Have you ever seen a Hydro Ottawa crew in your neighbourhood and wondered what we’re doing? Chances are the visit is part of our ongoing efforts to evaluate, replace and upgrade infrastructure across our service area, ensuring a reliable electricity grid now and into the future.
Maintaining one of Ontario’s largest electricity grids, covering 1,116 square kilometres and serving more than 364,000 customers, is no small task. It requires continuous investment, careful planning, and dedicated crews who work tirelessly in all conditions to keep the electricity flowing to our customers. We have one of the province’s greenest, safest, and most reliable electricity grids — and we want to keep it that way.
- Today: our crews are constantly working to maintain and upgrade the grid to ensure it operates smoothly and reliably.
- Year-round: we have a robust, year-round maintenance and upgrade program to address wear and tear, prevent outages, and enhance safety.
- For the future: every five years, we update our investment plan to account for new customers and technologies, upgrade existing services to expand capacity for our growing city, and replace aging infrastructure - ensuring we can maintain safe and reliable electricity distribution.
The maintenance work that keeps us busy
From routine inspections to replacing aging infrastructure, we complete numerous projects throughout the year to keep Ottawa’s electricity grid in good shape. These include:
- Pole repair or replacement: All 49,000 poles in our service area are inspected in 10-year intervals and tested to ensure their integrity and functionality. Poles that have reached end-of-life or are too damaged to repair must be replaced. Construction activities can occur in your area ranging from replacing a single pole to the majority of poles in an older part of town. These replacements are completed to ensure the safety and continued reliability of service in your neighbourhood.
- Transformer repair or replacement: Transformers are crucial elements of our grid, and are what helps manage the voltage that runs from substations to businesses and homes. We regularly inspect the 38,946 transformers throughout the region to detect potential damage and ensure their continuous operation.
- Cable repair or replacement: Whether above ground or beneath, our entire cable infrastructure requires regular inspection to determine its condition and priority for replacement. Replacing underground infrastructure more often than not requires significant excavation to gain access, but remains essential to maintaining reliable service.
- Vegetation management: Trees and shrubs that grow too close to power lines must be cut back or removed. In a typical year, we trim more than 60,000 trees across our service area.
The nature of this work can vary significantly. In order to protect the safety of our crews and customers, it may be necessary to temporarily turn off the power during repairs or upgrades. When planning service interruptions to support some of the work we do, we carefully schedule a time and repair method that will minimize both the duration and the number of customers impacted. Those customers will be notified by Hydro Ottawa in advance through physical letter distribution (if the outage is expected to last over six hours), phone, email, and/or a text/SMS message depending on the information we have on hand/preferences at least 24-72 hours. (Customers can sign up for Outage alerts via MyAccount).
In certain situations, we may also need to close roads, limit parking or redirect traffic away from project sites. These measures are implemented to keep you and our crews safe, and to complete projects in a timely manner. As you come across power line construction and maintenance on our commute, always remember to slow down and respect signage.
Lastly, your property may have a Hydro Ottawa easement: a section of land our crews have the right to cross or use for the purpose of tending to our infrastructure or equipment. If necessary, our crews may need to use the easement to do a repair or complete maintenance. Other than keeping that part of your property accessible and clear of vegetation, there’s nothing else you need to do.
As we perform these essential maintenance and upgrade activities, we appreciate your understanding and cooperation. Together, we can ensure that Ottawa's electricity grid remains one of the safest and most reliable in the province.
