Duane Hicks
The power went out yesterday morning and when it came back on six hours later, the Fort Frances Power Corp. had 26 new customers.
The FFPC has expanded its territory to include McIrvine Road North and Frog Creek Road up to the town boundary, switching over Hydro One customers to FFPC ones in the process.
“We’ve been working with Hydro One over the last couple of years to clean up our service territory,” explained FFPC CEO and president Joerg Ruppenstein.
“We’ve had residents inside the Town of Fort Frances, and businesses, too, that are actually serviced by Hydro One,” he noted.
“So we went through a whole legal proceeding with Hydro One and the Ontario Energy Board, and the long and short of it is, we are transferring customers that are inside the Town of Fort Frances over to us to clean up our service territory.
“So this outage that happened yesterday, the reason was not the customers coming over but we used that opportunity to do the work,” Ruppenstein added.
He said because Hydro One operates its distribution system at a different voltage than the FFPC, the latter had to go in and modify equipment settings.
And for some transformers that were not compatible, they had to change them out.
The FFPC also had to extend its feeder system to the former Hydro One customers, which entailed purchasing a section of feeder system from Hydro One and connecting it to the FFPC’s.
The FFPC also had to install its own smart meters into residences, and tie all of the new customers into its billing system.
Ruppenstein noted this was the first expansion the FFPC has done in about 30 years.
“We’re very, very happy about being able to expand and ultimately to service all of Fort Frances,” he remarked.
The FFPC has two more planned expansions—one on Minnie Avenue and another in the far east end of town, just before Couchiching.
This will bring five more Hydro One customers over to the FFPC.
