TORONTO – Toronto Hydro will not be increasing rates in order to recover the multi-million dollar costs racked up from restoring power during December’s ice storm.
Toronto Hydro CEO Anthony Haines announced Monday that the utility would not be hiking prices for its customers.
“I really didn’t feel right about asking our customers to pay for the costs associated with it; it’s a big dollar amount—it’s almost $13 million,” he told reporters at city hall.
The pre-Christmas ice storm knocked out power to approximately 300,000 Toronto Hydro customers for several days. The utility instituted an emergency response in order to get power restored, at a cost of about $1 million a day.
Since the power was restored, Haines said hydro officials were looking for ways to “cut corners” and find efficiencies throughout the budget in order to absorb the costs. In addition to that, he said the utility had met its “financial and business objectives” for the previous year.
“A little here, a little there, we’ll all work together and therefore we’re not going to ask our customers to pay for the costs associated with the storm,” he said. “We had a good year last year.”
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