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Published:
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
City Councillor
Peggy Feltmate wants Hydro Ottawa to give customers
who experience frequent blackouts a $120-per-year
break.
Ms. Feltmate,
who represents Kanata, says some residents in
her area have had more than a dozen blackouts
in the last few months and they are getting
tired of it.
Officials of
the company, which the city owns, acknowledge
Kanata experiences more blackouts than other
parts of the city, but say they are repairing
the aging grid system as fast as possible. Ms.
Feltmate says the repairs are taking too long,
and at city council tomorrow, she'll introduce
a plan for penalizing the company for poor performance.
Under her plan,
if a person's power is cut more than 12 times
a year, the hydro company would only be able
to charge that customer 50 per cent of the current
delivery fee.
For an average
household consuming 750 kilowatt hours of electricity
per month, this would mean a delivery charge
of about $10.50 per month, instead of the current
$21.
The plan would
apply to Hydro Ottawa customers across the city.
Ms. Feltmate
said she's putting the idea forward because
residents in her ward are fed up.
"It's
difficult and frustrating for people,"
she said. "Everybody expects this to happen
every once in a while, but when it gets up to
five times in a month, it's not acceptable."
She said a
rebate would give people at least some peace
of mind.
According to
Hydro Ottawa statistics, customers in Kanata
were six times more likely to have a blackout
last year than customers downtown.
The average
customer in Kanata had 2.4 power outages in
2005, compared to 1.5 in Gloucester, 0.9 in
the former city of Nepean and 0.4 in the former
city of Ottawa.
Hydro Ottawa
president Rosemary Leclair said on the whole,
the city has one of the most reliable hydro
grids in the province and often the cause of
the outages can't be controlled by the company.
Weather-related
outages and the shutdown of supply from Hydro
One are good examples of this, she said.
She said the
situation in Kanata has developed because it
was largely built all at once during a boom
in the 1970s. She said the lifespan of most
of the distribution system is over and it needs
to be replaced or repaired. It's not practical
to do this all at once, because it would mean
neglecting other parts of the city, she said.
She said the
company started addressing the situation in
2003, and now the area gets the lion's share
of the money for upgrades and repairs.
"Kanata
has nine per cent of our customers -- 25,000
-- and we are spending 30 per cent of our capital
dollars there," Ms. Leclair said. "We
are on it, and we are trying to improve the
situation as quickly as possible."
Ms. Leclair
doesn't see merit in Ms. Feltmate's plan.
She said it
doesn't amount to a big saving for customers,
very few customers would qualify, and it would
not be a big enough financial hit to get the
company to move any more quickly, which is as
fast as it can go.
"I just
don't see what it would achieve," Ms. Leclair
said.
City council
cannot force Hydro Ottawa to implement the plan.
However, if council endorses the plan, Ms. Feltmate
expects the three council members who sit on
the Hydro Ottawa board to introduce her plan
at the utility's next meeting.
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