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Having dealt with Hydro One on permits and pole replacements from the telecom side of things, I can say that their methodology is not geared towards minimizing

by bcrl 5y ago

Having dealt with Hydro One on permits and pole replacements from the telecom side of things, I can say that their methodology is not geared towards minimizing costs. They wanted me to pay $20,000 to replace 8 suspect / restricted insulators on one pole line, all of which were within 6 kilometers of each other. Done by a reasonable private contractor, all 8 insulators could have been done by a single crew in 1 day. Not Hydro One. Each one gets scheduled independently and assumes 2 hours of travel time to get to the job location (a not entirely unreasonable assumption for independent jobs, but ridiculous in the circumstances). What's worse is when Hydro One's shortsightedness ends up costing them gobs of cash. I've seen brand new pole lines replaced within 2 years of being built because the ADET didn't leave any Spare Capacity on the poles. Add a communications strand and multiple poles need replacement. Since they had 6 phases of power on 60+ foot poles, Hydro One's replacement cost is north of $15k per pole. All because the lower class pole was maybe a few hundred dollars cheaper. #FAIL

mleonhard 5y ago
The company is supporting a lot of local contractors. Do you think they waste money because of incompetence or corruption?
- bcrl 5y ago
  Actually, Hydro One doesn't use local contractors all that much as it's heavily unionized. Even in discussions about permitting, hands are often tied as it is almost impossible to assign work previously done by union employees to external contractors or even those of us submitting permits. For the last few years Hydro One has been trying to reform its internal processes for permits, and the folks in charge of that get huge amounts of push back internally, making the pace of change abysmally slow even though everyone knows they have a problem. There is also the perverse incentives of operating a regulated utility. As they are usually the monopoly LDC in a given area, the amount profits they are permitted to generate are limited relative to their costs (somewhere around 10-15% iirc). This creates a perverse incentive to inflate costs as they are then permitted to generate larger profits. If they reduced costs and profits grew too large, they would be forced to lower rates, which is clearly a bad thing in the view of Hydro One management.
  - mleonhard 5y ago
    Thanks for explaining the root cause.
bcrl 5y ago
I forgot to mention that Hydro Ottawa does the build for the future thing. Hydro Ottawa's design standards are to design for a minimum of 3 communications strands on all new poles. This results in significantly less make-ready on Hydro Ottawa poles. Hydro One in contrast has no such mandatory design standards, so whatever the ADET feels like on the day they're doing the design work is what gets installed.
xattt 5y ago
I had a tangential WTF experience with Hydro One about a decade ago, but I’m not sure of this is typical for rural power operators. I worked on an island on Lake of the Woods that was wired with power, phone and DSL. The next day, Hydro One was flying a branded helicopter up and down the chain of islands that were wired together to figure out where the lines were down. The helicopter was absolutely bizarre to me and seemed like overkill, given that I only grew up in urban settings before. I though they might run a boat and walk the ROW. The helicopter seemed like an expensive toy they got to play with every so often.
- bcrl 5y ago
  That raises another difference between Hydro One and Hydro Ottawa: Hydro Ottawa has sensors on primary all over the network (something like every 3-5 km). The sensors make it possible to locate faults within a fairly small part of the distribution network almost instantaneously. In contrast Hydro One has very few sensors, maybe one every 15 to 20 km in parts of the network, and sometimes no sensors at all on rural lines that can require driving 50+ km of line to find the fault. We routinely have 4-6 hour power outages, and a good chunk of the repair time is spent finding the fault. Again, Hydro One could install more reclosers on rural lines to isolate faults, but that doesn't seem to be the design philosophy they follow. It's not entirely Hydro One's fault. Building a sensor network in rural Canadian shield geography is challenging as getting radio signals through rocks, hills and trees can be almost impossible, but I still think they can do better.
  - mleonhard 5y ago
    The sensor signals can travel through the power lines. No radio is necessary.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

by bcrl 5y ago

mleonhard 5y ago

The company is supporting a lot of local contractors. Do you think they waste money because of incompetence or corruption?

bcrl 5y ago
Actually, Hydro One doesn't use local contractors all that much as it's heavily unionized. Even in discussions about permitting, hands are often tied as it is almost impossible to assign work previously done by union employees to external contractors or even those of us submitting permits. For the last few years Hydro One has been trying to reform its internal processes for permits, and the folks in charge of that get huge amounts of push back internally, making the pace of change abysmally slow even though everyone knows they have a problem. There is also the perverse incentives of operating a regulated utility. As they are usually the monopoly LDC in a given area, the amount profits they are permitted to generate are limited relative to their costs (somewhere around 10-15% iirc). This creates a perverse incentive to inflate costs as they are then permitted to generate larger profits. If they reduced costs and profits grew too large, they would be forced to lower rates, which is clearly a bad thing in the view of Hydro One management.
- mleonhard 5y ago
  Thanks for explaining the root cause.

bcrl 5y ago

I forgot to mention that Hydro Ottawa does the build for the future thing. Hydro Ottawa's design standards are to design for a minimum of 3 communications strands on all new poles. This results in significantly less make-ready on Hydro Ottawa poles. Hydro One in contrast has no such mandatory design standards, so whatever the ADET feels like on the day they're doing the design work is what gets installed.

xattt 5y ago

I had a tangential WTF experience with Hydro One about a decade ago, but I’m not sure of this is typical for rural power operators. I worked on an island on Lake of the Woods that was wired with power, phone and DSL. The next day, Hydro One was flying a branded helicopter up and down the chain of islands that were wired together to figure out where the lines were down. The helicopter was absolutely bizarre to me and seemed like overkill, given that I only grew up in urban settings before. I though they might run a boat and walk the ROW. The helicopter seemed like an expensive toy they got to play with every so often.

bcrl 5y ago
That raises another difference between Hydro One and Hydro Ottawa: Hydro Ottawa has sensors on primary all over the network (something like every 3-5 km). The sensors make it possible to locate faults within a fairly small part of the distribution network almost instantaneously. In contrast Hydro One has very few sensors, maybe one every 15 to 20 km in parts of the network, and sometimes no sensors at all on rural lines that can require driving 50+ km of line to find the fault. We routinely have 4-6 hour power outages, and a good chunk of the repair time is spent finding the fault. Again, Hydro One could install more reclosers on rural lines to isolate faults, but that doesn't seem to be the design philosophy they follow. It's not entirely Hydro One's fault. Building a sensor network in rural Canadian shield geography is challenging as getting radio signals through rocks, hills and trees can be almost impossible, but I still think they can do better.
- mleonhard 5y ago
  The sensor signals can travel through the power lines. No radio is necessary.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]