Guernsey Electricity managing director Ian Watson, left, shows the UK Government’s Minister of State for Energy Malcolm Wicks around the power station. (Picture by Adrian Miller, 0599838)
POWER was lost to each islander for an average of 37 minutes in 2007.
In the UK, the average was 100 minutes.
Of 21,000 events covered under Guernsey Electricity’s guaranteed service standards, it missed the required performance on just five occasions in 2006/7.
More than a third of the supply time lost was the result of just two incidents, the first at Cobo and the other at Admiral Park.
The latter of these was caused by damage to an underground power cable by another contractor.
Managing director Ian Watson said that illustrated the difficulty that local utility companies faced.
He said customer service and reliability were key priorities for the company.
‘Our guaranteed standards set stringent criteria for performance which assure our customers of a high level of service and we have fallen short of our own high targets just five times,’ he said.
‘The credit for that has to go to our staff as it goes to show what an excellent job they are doing and the excellent level of service that our customers can expect.
‘As far as reliability is concerned, in an ideal world we would not have any supply failures.
‘What we can do is try to ensure these are kept to a minimum, and we do that by investing in the network to improve resilience and reduce the potential for faults.
‘As a result, islanders are continuing to enjoy one of the most reliable electricity supplies in the world.’
Article posted on 9th August, 2008 - 2.29pm
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