EnWin hints at delivery fee hikes for customers

EnWin ​Customers should prepare themselves for an increase on their power bills.

The utility is distributing a survey to determine whether customers could stomach an increase in delivery charges to help ensure a more reliable power grid. EnWin CEO Helga Reidel told Windsor Morning delivery charges must go up if the company is to maintain its infrastructure. 

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"What EnWin manages is the cost of the lines you see around the city, the transmission lines along the city and we have to keep those in good repair," said Reidel. "Ultimately, yes, this is a survey to see what our customers will tolerate and what our customers expect in terms of that reliability and what they are willing to pay for it."

Reidel says businesses like Chrysler's Windsor Assembly Plant rely on "perfect power" and outages cost them money. She said EnWin was able to restore power relatively quickly to most customers during the mass outages on Wednesday but the infrastructure won't be so reliable in years to come without additional investment.

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"In the longterm, eventually the system would decay and we could not be able to restore power as quickly as we did in this most recent storm," said Reidel. "Over time the system would breakdown ... people would eventually see it and business, unfortunately, would eventually feel that pain."

Reidel says the increase in delivery fees is still a few years away, 2019 at the earliest. Any hike would also need approval of the Ontario Energy Board.