Business community welcomes merger of Hydro One Brampton with other power companies

BramptonGuardian.com
April 2, 2015
Nouman Khalil

Some key members of Brampton’s business community are welcoming the Ontario government’s plans to merge Hydro One Brampton with three other giant local companies.

The Globe and Mail Thursday reported that Queen’s Park is currently in talks to consolidate Hydro One Brampton – a division of the province’s Hydro One transmission and distribution giant – with three other local organizations including Enersource Corp., PowerStream Inc. and Horizon Utilities Corp.

The new entity is expected to serve roughly 960,000 customers in Toronto, Mississauga, Hamilton, Brampton and Vaughan.

The news “is welcomed by the business community of Brampton,” said Todd Letts, CEO of Brampton Board of Trade. “The electricity system in Ontario is a source of great dissatisfaction for the business community and the reason is that there are no scale of efficiency in the system.”

He said margins are being squeezed in many industries because of the competition in the global market place and electricity was a competitive advantage. When Brampton businesses try to hire or enter new markets, pricing is a real issue and it proved to be a real competitive disadvantage.

Letts thinks the provincial government’s mandate is to make changes and get things like the debt recovery charge off the books. He said as a result of the consolidation of Hydro One Brampton, reduction in administration costs is expected.

“We welcome more consolidation. We welcome more efficiency at the back end and we hope that this will contribute to both better service and mitigate the increases in the electricity pricing,” said Letts.

Jim Wilson, the interim leader of the opposition PC party, said in the legislature yesterday that any money from the sale of Hydro One must be directed to the province’s electricity debt.

“The Electricity Act prevents you from putting that money toward anything but that $27 billion debt. Are you going to obey the law or will you simply ignore it?” Wilson asked.

He said the debt of $27 billion translates into $5,400 per Ontario ratepayer that would have to be found if the law wasn’t followed.

Enersource, which is 90 percent owned by the City of Mississauga, serves 200,000 residential and commercial customers across the city. Powerstream and Horizon are each owned together by various municipalities across the GTA region.