Tim Curtis
Special to The Lake Report

Niagara-on-the-Lake residents have experienced a large number of power outages this summer. 

I wish I had a simple answer to explain why, but the reality is, there isn’t one. It’s complicated.

Instead, let me offer some background on the outages and discuss some of the changes we are making at NOTL Hydro.

First, some numbers. As the accompanying graph shows, there have been a lot more outages this summer compared to the past three years. 

NOTL Hydro’s reliability had been good.  For obvious reasons, this is something we track closely and our reliability has historically been better than the industry average. 

There are two types of outages we do not include in measuring our performance. The first are temporary outages of less than a minute.

Though they are frustrating, they are actually an example of our system working.  Something (a tree branch or animal) likely contacted our lines and caused an outage. 

However, the contact was not permanent and our system was able to restore itself thanks to an instrument called a recloser. 

We also don’t count outages caused by Hydro One, as they are out of our control. We had a good example of such an outage on July 16.

Looking ahead, we will be adding more outage information on our website, including a list of all outages, with the date, cause, number of customers affected and duration.

As well, charts will show our performance by month over the year.

Here is a summary of the most recent outages:

• 16 were weather-related, caused by lightning or trees contacting the lines due to high winds. One of our changes will be having our contractor do the tree trimming earlier in the year.  For the past two years it has been done mostly in the summer when we really need it done in the spring before the trees start growing again. We are also working with the town, region and federal government to get more dead trees removed.

• 15 outages were due to contacts with wildlife.  As I write this on Sept. 5, there has been another outage due to contact with birds, starlings this time. Birds and squirrels are the main culprits. If they are just sitting on a line it’s not a problem. But if they contact two different lines, which usually happens near the poles, we can have a short, a blown fuse and usually a dead animal. One change we have started to make is to install trip-savers instead of fuses. A trip-saver costs about $5,000 — not cheap — but they will prevent an outage. We installed six this year and will add more in the future.

• 9 outages were scheduled. This is usually for our own upgrades but could also be for a third party. Earlier this month we had an outage to allow for the safe installation of a new water culvert. Any customer that will be affected by a planned outage is always given advance warning and we try to keep the outage as short as possible.

• 3 outages were caused by failure of some of our own equipment. This can happen with age and wear and tear. For  example, in late August the bolts clamping a wire onto a bracket had loosened and over time the movement of the wire in the clamp eventually caused it to break.  This wire was more than 50 years old.  Now that we have largely completed the voltage conversions on our overhead system, we have started to replace all the older wiring and poles. This will still take many years. 

• A more significant equipment failure occurred on June 13 when one of the large feeder wires bringing power out of our York station shorted, cutting power to more than 1,700 customers. It turns out the method of installing these wires around 20 years ago allowed water into the wire assembly and this eventually led to the short. We replaced the feeder line this year and will be replacing the other two next year as well as the three original feeder lines coming out of our NOTL station. These are expensive wires and the cost of all this work will be more than $500,000.

• 2 outages were caused by vehicle accidents. One hit one of our poles and the other took out one of our transformers, causing a fire. As long as the driver stays on the scene we are able to get their insurance information and charge them for the cost of the repairs.

• 1 outage was a loss of supply from Hydro One at our NOTL station. This occurred on July 16 and affected more than 3,600 customers — and accounted for one-third of the total customer outages this summer. It lasted almost three hours but for our customers the impact was a little over a half-hour as we were able to transfer all the customers to our York station. Switching power between our stations still involves some manual activity.  One of our goals is to fully automate this process, so the power transfer can be done more quickly. Automated switches are not cheap and cost over $60,000 to install so we only add one or two a year.

• Finally, sometimes we just can’t determine the cause of an outage. It is usually an animal or tree contact that blows the fuse or brings a line down but there is no evidence. We had one such incident this summer.

I am hopeful this summer’s spike in outages were just bad luck in timing but we will continue to invest to improve and strengthen NOTL’s electrical system.

Tim Curtis is CEO of NOTL Hydro.