Saint John Energy outshines NB Power in reliability ranking
When 52,000 NB Power customers lost electricity through central New Brunswick two weeks ago, line crews from Saint John Energy made a trip up Highway 7 to help fix the trouble.
The municipal utility has been offering assistance a lot in recent years as NB Power has struggled with record outages from one corner of the province to other.
Meanwhile, the lights have barely flickered in Saint John.
"We probably fare five times better than others [utilities] across Canada," said Ray Robinson, the president and chief executive officer of Saint John Energy, about the frequency of outages in the city.
"I'd say we're certainly in the top 10 per cent nationally."
Saint John has a lot of problems, but reliable electricity hasn't been one of them.
Power rates are nine per cent cheaper than elsewhere in the province and outages are rare events.
When they do occur, they generally don't last long.
Over the last five years, while the average NB Power customer has endured 15 outages and 90 hours without power, the average customer of Saint John Energy has lost electricity just four times for a total of eight hours.
Robinson said municipal utilities are generally easier to manage than provincial ones because they don't have to serve large sprawling rural areas.
In Saint John's case, about one quarter of its power lines are sheltered from harm underground with the rest easily accessible inside city boundaries.
Still the city's reliability numbers have been noticeable, especially given extended outages suffered on its doorstep by NB Power customers in Rothesay, Quispamsis and Grand Bay-Westfield twice in the last year.
Robinson said the utility spends a lot of time and money keeping trees out of its wires and that helped cut the severity of outages during both Arthur and last winter's ice storms.
"I’ve worked at other utilities where for budgeting purposes they've backed off on the vegetation management budget, but that only comes back to bite you big time," said Robinson.
"Because then you will experience significant interruptions and then trying to get back on top of it, you are probably going to have to invest two or three times what you would have otherwise if you had just stayed the course."
