J. Paul Morgan, Deputy Director-General in charge of electricity and water at the Office of Utilities Regulation (OUR), speaks during a press conference at the OUR's office at the PCJ Building, New Kingston yesterday. At left is C. Courtney Jackson, Deputy Director-General in charge of the telecommunications sector. - Rudolph Brown/Staff Photographer THE DIRECTOR-GENERAL of the Office of Utilities Regulation (OUR), Winston Hay, says electricity consumers should give the management of the power-cut plagued Jamaica Public Service Company (JPSCo) more time before passing judgment on their performance.
Noting that Mirant Corporation took over the company just over a year ago, Mr. Hay said it had inherited a system that was already facing problems and, therefore, it was to its credit that it had decided to deal with the core function of electricity before moving on to other business ventures.
His comments were made in response to a question, during a press conference at the OUR's Trafalgar Road, New Kingston office yesterday, as to whether the JPSCo, given its record of performance as the island's monopoly light and power company, could guarantee the requisite service standards as a utility provider.
Mr. Hay did not elaborate but noted that JPSCo., which was granted a licence under the liberalised telecommunications market, had not yet moved to provide telecommunications services.
While the JPSCo was awarded a licence to compete against telecommunications giant Cable & Wireless Jamaica late last year in domestic fixed link services, the company has said it had no plans to get involved in the telecommunications field and that the decision to seek the licence was merely to keep its business options open.
Mr. Hay insisted, "I also think that you need to give the company's current management more time to deal with the electricity service, before you pass judgement on their performance," he said.
The OUR has long taken the position that the frequent power outages experienced, especially since Mirant Corporation of Atlanta, US, acquired majority interest in the JPSCo in February last year, would have occurred no matter which entity had taken over the plant, because generating capacity had not kept pace with demand.
Earlier at the press conference, Mr. Hay used the opportunity to apologise to Cable & Wireless Jamaica (C&WJ) for an error in the OUR's last quarterly report, which suggested the telecommunications provider, rather than the JPSCo, was the most complained about utility company during the period.
He said although consumers made more contacts with the OUR in relation to services offered by C&WJ, "the complaints made against Cable and Wireless were actually less than those made against the Jamaica Public Service Company".
The Director-General also announced that the OUR had made an arrangement with the island's postal service, whereby, anyone with a complaint against the utility companies could pick up a form at any post office or postal agency, detail the complaints on the form, hand it back to the post office and have it delivered to the regulator at no cost to the consumer.
And J. Paul Morgan, Deputy Director-General in charge of the electricity and water sectors, said the utility regulator would embark on an exercise to look at various options for developing a competitive generation market because, in the final analysis, it was the generation prices that would influence the price of electricity to consumers.
He also said the response of consumers to the JPSCo's quality service standards had not been encouraging in that millions of dollars that would otherwise have been paid out to consumers has been retained by the JPSCo because of lack of claims.
Mr. Morgan said it was important that consumers made the claims, partly to ensure the required level of services promised by the utility companies. Last year, the JPSCo and the NWC committed to compensate consumers if they failed to comply with the standards. In the case of the JPSCo, compensation for non-compliance of each standard was set at $150 for residential customers and $750 for commercial customers.
