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Hydro One isn’t sure how many northern meters need changing

Hydro One doesn't know how many of the 36,000 smart meters it's now planning to read manually are located in Greater Sudbury – or Northern Ontario.
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Hydro One doesn't know how many of the 36,000 smart meters it's now planning to read manually are located in Greater Sudbury – or Northern Ontario. File photo.
Hydro One doesn't know how many of the 36,000 smart meters it's now planning to read manually are located in Greater Sudbury – or Northern Ontario.

The utility made news this week when it emerged Hydro One was giving up trying to read smart meters remotely in rural parts of Ontario, because they couldn't get reliable signals from the meters.

The goal of the $2-billion smart meter program was to encourage off-peak use of energy, when rates and demand for power was lower. Key to the strategy was being able to read signals from the meters to determine when energy being used.

But many of the meters failed to work in rural areas, and contributed to billing nightmares that led to record complaints from the public and an investigation by the Ontario Ombudsman's office.

“In some parts of Hydro One’s service territory and for some customers, the communications network is not strong enough to consistently transmit the information,” Hydro One spokesperson Daffyd Roderick said in an email to Northern Life this week.

“Hydro One has reviewed individual meter reading and communication reliability and has requested to move certain customers to manual meter reads where necessary. Hydro One received approval from the Ontario Energy Board for this request.”

But a followup question from Northern Life regarding how many customers in Northern Ontario and Greater Sudbury are affected by the change elicited this response from Hydro communications officer Alicia Sayers.

“This information is not available,” Sayers said in an email. “It is done on an individual customer (meter) basis ... The 36,000 are spread out across the province.”

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Darren MacDonald

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