Making customer service important again

The chief executive of Toronto Hydro – who joined the company in 2005 – discovered that a power failure of less than a minute wasn't counted as an outage by the utility.

He got a different perspective from his wife, who works from home, sometimes facilitating on-line conferences that are knocked out even by a mini-outage.

"We've done a really awful job in recent years of serving customers, as an industry," Haines told a conference on modernizing the electricity system, organized by the Strategy Institute.

The first year in his new home, Haines said his neighbourhood racked up 801 minutes in recognized outages.

His own experience drove home the need to think of the customer's perspective, not the utility's, in modernizing Toronto's frayed electric system, he said.

One-third of Toronto Hydro's equipment is older than its expected service life.

Part of modernizing the system is simply installing equipment that will tell the utility when the power goes out.

In a traditional system, the utility doesn't know a power has been knocked out until a customer calls them.

Call centres had to piece together information from the number and location of calls to figure out how widespread an outage was, and what kind of a crew to send to repair the damage.

Toronto Hydro is now installing many more sensors on its system to alert the utility of where failures have occurred, and what kind of equipment is out, he said in an interview.

Some smart meters will automatically send a signal if the power fails.

And there are more ways to re-route power around a problem, so customers get their power back even before the root cause has been fixed.

But the improved system hasn't made its way through the whole grid, Haines said.

It will take more time, and money, to upgrade. Toronto Hydro itself has asked for an 18 per cent rate increase this year, in part for modernization.

But if he wants some motivation, he needs to think back only to the blackout that hit much of Toronto in July.

Queen Elizabeth was in town that day, and Haines was introduced to her prior to an event at the Royal York Hotel.

"I'm responsible for keeping the lights on," Haines told her.

Then the event started. And the lights went out.