The Jamaica Public Service Company, JPS, says it has already spent US$4 million to repair damage caused by Hurricane Sandy.
And JPS vice president for technical services Ricardo Rennalls says it is projected that the entire restoration process will cost over US$7 million.
Speaking at a press conference this morning to update the country on the JPS restoration work, Rennals disclosed that the compaany suffered extensive damage to its distribution system.
He says the JPS lost thousands of electricity poles and 130 transformers, but has already restored over 1,500 poles.
While praising the performance of the company throughout the
George Davis, guest columnist The energy minister, Phillip Paulwell, has taken a lot of stick from members of the advocacy group, Citizens United to Reduce Electricity (CURE), for the turn of events regarding the all-island licence granted to the Jamaica Public Service Company (JPS) by the People’s National Party (PNP) administration in 2001. The criticism, including the claim that the minister has betrayed the Jamaican consumer by supporting his Government‘s decision to appeal the ruling, is fully merited. The minister, whose popularity was in the early part of its growth phase at the time, effectively ‘called down crosses’ upon himself by hailing the July 30 Supreme Court ruling of Justice Bryan Sykes as a major decision in his own bid to bring competition to the energy sector. The lawyer for CURE, Hugh Wildman, is on record saying Minister Paulwell told him privately that the court ruling will allow him and his Government to break up the JPS monopoly on the transmission and distribution of electricity. With that admission, Paulwell effectively cut his own tamarind switch and asked CURE to flog him senseless after the reasons for the Government’s decision to join the JPS in appealing the ruling were articulated in the House of Representatives by Attorney General Patrick Atkinson on November 6. Gathering storm But the wrath at Paulwell’s impression of a ‘two-side cutlass’ is threatening to relegate the real issues, concerning the court ruling, to the sidelines. Principal among those real issues is the fact that in reality, the landmark victory secured by CURE in the Supreme Court would create an unprecedented crisis in every atom of the Jamaican society. If, as the court found, the JPS’s all-island licence was indeed invalid, and the decision should be enforced, what would happen to the company’s operations? At what point would the JPS turn off the lights, send its employees home, and call time on its business interest in Jamaica? What would Portia Simpson Miller, her Government and the citizenry do when JPS, with justification, demanded the return of the billions of dollars invested in its business, on the premise of being a monopoly, since 2001? How would Government deal with the fact that it now has to foot a massive bill for a licence that it granted to the utility provider to meet the country’s energy needs? For anyone in the dark about why the attorney general was moved to advise the Government to appeal the ruling, I ask only that you think very carefully on these things. We should agree that shutting down the sole transmitter and distributor of electricity won’t translate into lower light bills for us, the hard-up and long-suffering JPS customers. If such a ruling were handed down against a company similar to the JPS today in, say, England, where Wildman found a 1913 court ruling to strengthen his arguments in the court, I could understand and accept. No competition here But England today, with its 42 counties, has more than 70 companies which supply customers with electricity or a combination of electricity and gas. Shutting down one of so many providers simply allows the customer to call in npower or a Sainsbury’s Energy to supply their electricity needs. That, unfortunately, is not the reality in Jamaica. In all this, one must sympathise with the members of CURE. Theirs is, and continues to be, a gallant effort to do something about the crippling cost of our residential and commercial electricity bills. Hugh Wildman is a ‘square-shooting Irregular power supply wreaks havoc with equipment Several public-sector entities are now reporting damage to expensive equipment because of surges in the electricity supply from the Jamaica Public Service Company (JPS). The power surges have left some entities nursing hefty repair bills, while they await compensation. Among those hit hardest are hospitals, whose existence depend on sufficient electricity to keep life-saving equipment running. The JPS has admitted that there have been complaints and claims for compensation from public entities such as hospitals but it has refused to provide details. But checks by JAMAICA Public Service‘s (JPS) customers may soon be able to pay their bills in advance through a pre-paid system that will be implemented next year. “Jamaicans already have a pre-paid psychology, said Kelly Tomblin, president and chief executive officer of JPS. Most people in Jamaica are used to paying for their cell phones with pre-paid cards. “We believe the system can be easily managed and it gives customers a way to mange their expenses” she said. Pre-paid metres will form an integral part of the company‘s program to help reduce losses and is a key strategic initiative in 2013, the company said. A programme to persuade customers to take the new metres will be launched early next year. So far, the project’s team has conducted research and the programme is in its planning stages, JPS said. Preliminary feedback from customers is that it is something they would appreciate, said Winsome Callum, JPS’s head of corporate communications. Some of the company’s customers don’t just pay their bills on time, they pay in advance,” she said. “As soon as they get their income, they pay.” Tomblin reckons the system will be economically viable. JPS has already installed 6,000 Korean-built metres that have a pre-paid capacity, but the software to support the system is not yet in place. Elsewhere in the world, “where these systems have been installed, there is a high level of customer satisfaction. It gives the customer control,” JPS said. Customers know how much they can afford to spend and they regulate their use. The system would offer an alternative to disconnection for customers who have trouble paying their bills. Currently, the only tool the company has with people who don’t pay on time is to cut them off, since it can’t charge interest or late fees. “Something may come up. And for some reason, a customer may run into problems and have their light cut off,” Tomblin said. “Paying in advance will spare our customers.” But the metres are unlikely to address a bigger problem for the company, the 25 per cent system loss due to theft. Many power users have never paid for their electricity in their lives, Tomblin told the Jamaica Observer‘s Monday Exchange. Read more: Robert Pickersgill (centre), Minister with responsibility for Water, Land, Environment, and Climate Change, presses the button to officially inaugurate the West Kingston Power Plant. The state-of-the-art technology installed at the Industrial Terrace location is more efficient at converting fuel to energy, which should reduce the amount of energy lost to heat. In light of the current thrust in the industry towards LNG, the power station, which has been designed to run on heavy fuel oil, has the capacity to run on gas after minimum conversion efforts.
Read more: THE Jamaica Public Service (JPS) says it will be rolling out an education campaign as it seeks to partner with communities to manage overhanging vegetation around utility poles. President of JPS Kelly Tomblin said while the company has always had a vegetation management programme, it will be stepping up its efforts to deal with the problem, which contributed in part to the more than 6,000 poles that fell during the passage of Hurricane Sandy last month. “When I first came I contacted some experts on vegetation management to come down to Jamaica and work with our team and start a new vegetation programme a month before the hurricane,” Tomblin told editors and reporters at the Jamaica Observer weekly Monday Exchange held at the newspaper’s head office in Kingston. Vegetation management, she said, is not only about removing the overhanging trees and shrubs but being able to stump their regrowth through the use of chemicals. “We have recently made some changes in how we do vegetation control,” Tomblin said. She said vegetation management is particularly challenging in Jamaica because of the remote areas and how plants such as bamboo grow, and as such there is need for another approach. “Vegetation management requires a lot of community interaction… and so one of the things we hope to have more is community partnership in vegetation control both on individual owner perspective and community,” Tomblin said. Speaking to the power company‘s handling of the restoration programme across the island in the aftermath of the category one storm, Tomblin said there is a limitation to the appropriate resources the company has at its disposal. “We all wish we had unlimited resources, and if we did, instead of 80 crews we would have trained and ready to go 200 crews, but that would mean an even greater upward pressure on electric prices because most time we are not having an outage,” Tomblin said. Given the challenges, Tomblin said the company did well in restoring power to 90 per cent of its customers in four days. “From my more than two decades being involved in storm restoration, having 90 per cent of customers back in power after a hurricane is a very good solid performance,” she said. “To get 90 per cent of the people back in four days, I don’t know how much you can improve on that,” she added, noting that there are ways to make significant improvement on the remaining 10 per cent. She said there is a disconnect in the understanding of what the JPS teams really do go through and what is required. “If I tell a guy from the United States to take a pole and walk down two miles they would look at me like I have three heads, because they are not going to put that on their back and walk down the hill, but our guys have to do that,” she said. To date, the JPS said only 2,000 of its 480,000 customers are still without power. For these customers, Tomblin said the workers are having problems accessing the areas because of landslide and other challenges. The preliminary estimate for the restoration works is said to be in the region of US$7 million, and is expected to climb. Read more: THE EDITOR, Sir: The near-monopoly electricity provider, Jamaica Public Service Company (JPS), has unilaterally decided that it will be estimating our bills based on the last three months’ consumption, as if our usage remained intact for October, the month Hurricane Sandy devastated parts of the eastern end of the island. Those of us in the east who were without electricity service for an average of three to seven days, having been made to pay this estimated bill for October, will be credited thereafter in November when the meters are read. This means that JPS will be holding the amount for which we are to be eventually credited, for 30 days after taking it from us! That portion, which is bound to be a multimillion-dollar figure, will, in reality, be a 30-day Sandy loan from us all to JPS. Consider this iniquitous approach against people who have already suffered loss from the hurricane! If we, the consumers, had a say in the matter, the approach to billing could be more equitable, in that they could simply charge us 80 per cent of the average of our previous three months’ consumption, and for November, reconcile our accounts after there is a reading. To dictate that it will be an average of our past three months’ payments is to demonstrate the stranglehold monopolies providing an essential service have upon our meagre wallets. JPS must be reminded that we are all parties to a contract with them to provide service, and in that respect, the voices of the consumers are as important as that of the provider. BERT S. SAMUELS Attorney-at-law bert.samuels@gmail.com Read more: THE Jamaica Public Service Company (JPS) says that it is prepared to grant some leniency to its customers, particularly those in Portland, St Thomas and St Mary, who are struggling to recover from the effects of Hurricane Sandy. The move apparently forms part of efforts by the company to improve its customer service, for which it has received harsh criticisms over the years. Since her arrival in Jamaica earlier this year, the company’s President and Chief Executive Officer Kelly Tomblin made it clear that she intends to reposition JPS by paying attention to its customer service flaws, as she focuses on the company’s bottom line. Tomblin, who was a guest at yesterday’s Jamaica Observer Monday Exchange, disclosed that instructions have already been given for its parish managers and customer service personnel, particularly in the hard hit areas, to exercise discretion and to work with customers who may not be able to settle their bills in one payment. “This is an important part of JPS that I am committed to. Our customer service personnel and professionals have some parameters, especially around St Mary, St Thomas that really it has to be on a case-by-case scenario. I have also said to my team, people are going to have hard times, because not only have they lost power, they have lost a lot more and to work with them, we are going to have some discretion to make sure we don’t overburden them,” said the JPS CEO, even as she made it clear that the company will still have to honour its debt obligations to its suppliers, particularly state-owned oil refinery Petrojam from which it purchases fuel. Tomblin’s pronouncement came less than 24 hours after the company announced that about 20 per cent, or approximately 123,000 customers, would be receiving estimated bills for October as a result of the disruption in its meter-reading schedule. “JPS was unable to carry out meter reading in some communities in the period immediately after the hurricane, as many of the company’s meter readers were redeployed to assist with restoration,” explained Winsome Callum, JPS’s head of corporate communications, who was also a guest at the Monday Exchange. “Our billing system is set up to calculate estimated bills using an average of the last three actual readings of the customer’s meter. Some customers may therefore have been estimated for days when they were without electricity following the hurricane,” Callum added. Checks by the Jamaica Observer have revealed that the affected customers could actually see an initial increase in their bills as the three-month average will include consumption for the months of July and August which are normally characterised by higher energy consumption. Read more: Head of the Jamaica Public Service (JPS) Kelly Tomblin said the power company can no longer guarantee that customers will see as much as 40 per cent reduction in their electricity bills when it begins using liquefied natural gas (LNG) to operate its planned 360-megawatt power plant. In February this year, JPS’s then Chief Financial Officer Dan Theoc had said that the company expected the country’s first 360-megawatt project to deliver savings of 30-40 per cent on electricity bills based on the plant operating on cheaper LNG while using diesel fuel as a backup.
JPS president and CEO Kelly Tomblin says a pre-paid meter would help its customers control how much they spend on electricity.
Robert Pickersgill (centre), Minister with responsibility for Water, Land, Environment, and Climate Change, presses the button to officially inaugurate the West Kingston Power Plant. The state-of-the-art technology installed at the Industrial Terrace location is more efficient at converting fuel to energy, which should reduce the amount of energy lost to heat. In light of the current thrust in the industry towards LNG, the power station, which has been designed to run on heavy fuel oil, has the capacity to run on gas after minimum conversion efforts.
TOMBLIN… Vegetation management requires a lot of community interaction
JPS customers in areas like this in Eastern Jamaica which was devastated by Hurricane Sandy last month will benefit from some leniency with bill payments from the light and power company.