Every time the power goes off unexpectedly I think about something a Manitoba Hydro employee said a couple years ago.

In a fairly public gathering (I won't say which one to protect the individual) the employee described how most of the power outages around Winnipeg are due to the utility's aging infrastructure and noted they're going to keep happening for years.

I followed up on what I heard by officially asking Manitoba Hydro for data on their "infrastructure deficit;" the cost of fixing all those transformers and power lines that are about to go kaput.

They sent me this response - click here.

As you can see, Hydro doesn't account for the problem with an official “infrastructure deficit” figure like many municipalities do, they just noted they plan to spend $3.7 billion on the “distribution system, existing generation and transmission infrastructure and HVDC” from 2012-2022. In other words, a good chunk of change.

What really struck me about today's power outage was the impact it must have on businesses.

Today's outage hit a part of Winnipeg for the second time in less than a month. The last time it went out I popped by a grocery store in the affected area and was refused entry by staff.

I guess there's not much the store can do if the lights go out and their cash registers aren't powered. In that case the store not only lost sales, but also could have lost some dairy products if it got too hot and the power was out for an extended period of time.

No doubt you can think of other ways the outages are costing businesses lost productivity and revenue.

Not to mention the impact to Hydro households as well; whether it is not being able to turn on your TV, perhaps being prevented from running your home-based business or something more extreme like getting into an accident at an intersection that has no working traffic lights.

No matter how you cut it, the outages have an impact. So much so that I think they only exacerbate how bad the government's ill thought out decision is on Bipole III; running it down the west side of the province - at an added cost of at least an extra billion dollars.

Certainly those billion dollars could be better used to fix Hydro’s aging infrastructure – perhaps more proactively to prevent outages in the future (although I’ll give Hydro workers two thumbs up for getting the power back on in about 30 mins today.)

The entire Hydro expansion plan – to build two new dams and the Bipole line on the hope that U.S. customers will be there to buy our power – is of course a whole other matter.

But in the mean time, the outages are clearly the tip of the iceberg.

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