Michael Lesage has lived in 10 different cities across Canada, but it’s here in Niagara-on-the-Lake where he says he’s become on a first-name basis with the CEO of the local utility company for the first time.
The reason? Lesage, a Virgil resident, says that power outages have become a somewhat regular occurrence in his home.
Speaking to NOTL’s committee of the whole two weeks ago, Lesage said he’s been communicating frequently with NOTL Hydro president Tim Curtis, trying to get some answers about the reason for the blackouts in his area.
“Over a 12-month period we’ve certainly had more than 10 where I live,” said Lesage during the June 17 meeting.
“I know this not because I counted all of them, but I emailed Mr. Curtis with the subject line saying, ‘outage number one,’ ‘outage number two,’ I stopped counting at around outage seven or eight, and there’s been more since then.”
In two consecutive weeks, Niagara-on-the-Lake council heard about the issue of power outages in the town, the number of which have been going up in the last 12 months, said Curtis, who attended a special council meeting on June 24 specifically meant for NOTL Hydro.
“We are more than aware that we have had a lot more outages in the last 12 months than is normally the case,” Curtis said.
“I know you had someone presenting recently to council on that. … I certainly understand the frustration and I do sympathize.”
Three of the outages were due to a loss of power supply from Hydro One, Curtis said.
“That’s unusual, we can go several years without any,” Curtis said.
He also told council that wilderness issues were to blame for some of the outages, and NOTL Hydro had taken measures to deal with them.
“We’ve increased our budget by 50 per cent to try and trim trees to avoid outages,” Curtis said.
Other reasons for outages, Curtis said, are accidents, wildlife and equipment problems.
During the June 17 meeting, some councillors responded to Lesage’s comments with some degree of skepticism.
“I’ve lived here since ’64,” said Coun. Gary Burroughs. “I’m in the Old Town, but I don’t find outages to be a problem.”
Lesage said that Curtis has told him there could be “wilderness issues.” He also expressed skepticism of NOTL Hydro based on the “aspirational picture“ heavy nature of the reliability stats page of their website.
“If you’re having to post about how reliable you are, you’re not very reliable,” said Lesage.
Burroughs followed up with this and said, “Being critical of the hydro is not what we want to hear about. We want to hear your concerns, and we’ll do something about it.”
Coun. Wendy Cheropita also defended NOTL Hydro.
“There’s a lot of good that comes from NOTL Hydro,” she said.
Ultimately, Curtis concluded during his council appearance, customers tend to want one thing above all else in his industry.
“They just want power,” he said.
Curtis also said that electrical demands are expected to go up 75 per cent, or 2.2 per cent per year, by 2050.
