Entegrus Powerlines is pushing to improve the reliability of electricity in Blenheim.
A report going to Chatham-Kent Council on Monday night stated Entegrus wants Hydro One to reinstate a second feed to resolve "notable reliability concerns" in Blenheim over the past nine months.
The most notable power issue was a 7-hour, 20-minute outage on January 17, 2025 when a vehicle caused significant damage to a feeder supplying Blenheim, reported Entegrus.
Entegrus also said Blenheim experienced 10 momentary outages lasting less than one minute in duration so far this year because of a faulty underground cable in the Nicholson Park area, adding the cable was repaired last month.
Entegrus Vice President of Engineering and Operations Tomo Matesic said residents have raised concerns about both frequency and duration of power interruptions being experienced in the community due to system equipment failure, severe weather events, and the recent loss of a second power supply from Hydro One.
The second power supply to Blenheim was removed late last year when Hydro One reconfigured its distribution system.
"With this change in configuration, Entegrus’ smart switch team is no longer able to restore customers affected by Hydro One loss of supply events, and internal Entegrus faults now impact the full town instead of only half," wrote Matesic. "Historically, if one of the feeders serving Blenheim became unavailable due to a loss of supply event, Entegrus had the ability to manually adjust the system to supply all customers from a single feeder."
Entegrus said it has implemented several measures to improve reliability in Blenheim and is continuing to invest in infrastructure upgrades, but that second feed is necessary to improve power reliability in the town.
"Entegrus is in ongoing dialogue with Hydro One to re-establish a second feed to Blenheim," wrote Matesic in his report. "Hydro One has committed to studying customer load on the [second] feeder with the goal of identifying if supply can be made available to the community of Blenheim in the event of future loss of supply events."
Blenheim is served by Entegrus, but electricity is supplied by Hydro One.
Blenheim is home to 2,105 electricity customers comprised of 1,852 residential and 253 commercial/non-residential customers.