Hydro

Jeff Green | Dec 27, 2007

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An Ontario hydro construction crew from the Tweed office has been doing some extensive work in North Frontenac over the past few months. Earlier this summer, a $400,000 project to replace some old lines and put in new, higher capacity lines serving the Mountain Road/Grindstone Lake area north of Plevna.

“The changes will mean there will be less power interruptions for customers,” said Rick Holmes of Hydro One. “At one time most of the people living up there were seasonal residents who did not use much hydro, but that’s all changed now, so we needed to do something.”

Since late October, crews have been working at a switching station on Hwy 506 at the Hydro Field south of the township office, where they are building a new station. “The old station, which was built in the 1950s, was made of wood, and it was basically finished. We put up a temporary station, tore the old one down, and are building a new steel station that will last a long time,” Holmes said.

As part of the work that is being done, single and double phase lines are being replaced with three and four phase ines. This will reduce the impact of power failures in the area, because there will be more opportunity to isolate problems in smaller geographical regions.

The new lines that are being put in around the hydro field will have to be buried to maintain clearance from the overhead wires, which are part of a 230,000 volt line that runs from the Ottawa river to the Trent Severn waterway and provides power for much of Eastern Ontario.

The changes that are being made will improve service for most of North Frontenac and parts of Central Frontenac as well.

Rick Holmes said that Hydro One hopes to have construction completed by early February (weather permitting). There will be a major planned outage, about 6 hours, when the new station comes on line.

Hopefully that will be the last major outage in North Frontenac for quite a while.