Dialing down the amperage

Thursday, March 24, 2016

by SUSAN MANN

A newly created team of technical experts at Hydro One has been established to provide farming customers with better service for their on-farm electrical problems.

One of the Farm Rapid Response Team’s first priorities is to improve how the electrical company handles stray voltage and ground current matters, Hydro One says in a March 22 press release. The company has 13,000 farming customers. It also delivers electricity to more than 1.3 million customers across Ontario and to large industrial users and municipal utilities along with owning and operating transmission and distribution networks.

The company, Ontario’s largest electricity, transmission and distribution business, has been working with the Ontario Federation of Agriculture for the past two years as part of the Uncontrolled Electricity Working Group. It formed the team in partnership with the federation.

Once the team is in place, farmers will get a faster response to their electrical concerns and “it should be more uniform across the province,” says Brent Royce, federation board member for Huron and Perth and working group chair. “This (creation of the team) is the first step in some more to come that will hopefully resolve some of these issues.”

An Ontario Federation of Agriculture fact sheet says uncontrolled electricity is a constant underground current that runs through the soil and can be detected on barn floors or through metal in the barn, either in feeders or stabling structures. The unwanted electrical currents can cause serious harm to livestock.

Uncontrolled electricity is sometimes called stray or tingle voltage.

Federation president Don McCabe says the farm organization “has been involved in the stray voltage issue for decades.”

The formation of the team will hopefully streamline Hydro One’s response to farmers with electrical problems on their operations “to give an even faster response,” he notes. Having the team in place will enable Hydro One technicians “to show up on a farm (when the farmer has requested help) and assess the situation at the farm. This is an attempt to streamline and minimize the number of steps to get these things addressed.”

Federation spokesmen didn’t know how many Ontario farmers have stray voltage problems. “Wherever stray voltage is it’s causing an issue for animal welfare and farming businesses, therefore one case is one too many,” McCabe notes.

Royce says there seems to be different pockets and areas across Ontario with stray voltage problems and it’s not confined to just one section of the province.

Even though the team has been created, McCabe says the federation will continue working with Hydro One on both the stray voltage matter and “other issues as we more forward.”

Hydro One spokesperson Tiziana Baccega Rosa says by email the team will have 10 employees. A centrally located engineer will coordinate technical audits, prioritize investigations and the work of the nine local technicians. The technicians will be located in each of Hydro One’s nine provincial zones. The team is slated to be in place by summer.

She says Hydro One decided to place the nine technicians in the zones rather than in one central location because they are familiar with the community and aspects of the local electrical system.

The team’s purpose is to “respond to on-farm electrical issues quickly, effectively and provide the best possible path to resolution,” Baccega Rosa says.

Hydro One’s creation of a team dedicated to working on farm-related electrical problems is the latest development in helping farmers handle their electricity concerns. In February, Chatham-Kent-Essex MPP Rick Nicholls, a Conservative, proposed private member’s legislation, called the elimination of ground current pollution bill, in the Ontario Legislature. The bill passed second reading and has been sent to committee for hearings. There is no date yet on when those hearing will be held.

The proposed bill makes it mandatory for electricity providers to respond to a complaint about uncontrolled ground current within 10 days of receiving it. Providers must also investigate the claim within 30 days of getting it and take all necessary steps to eliminate the problem within five months of receiving the investigator’s report, if the report shows the provider is responsible. The provider must also take steps to ensure the problem doesn’t reoccur.

In the bill, it says the scientifically correct term is ground current or uncontrolled electricity and not stray voltage.

Baccega Rosa says the team was not created in response to Nicholls’ bill. Instead, it was created after the working group recommended a team specifically dedicated to on-farm electrical problems should be set up.

“It is the best approach to help improve outcomes for our farming customers and provides them with an easy, transparent, customer friendly process,” she notes.

The team’s work will include:

• Managing and investigating all stray voltage and related on-farm electrical issues.
• Completing full technical audits of all testing that has been conducted.
• Conducting larger investigations into the root causes of problems when they’re needed.
• Running alternative testing and trouble shooting on more complex problems and complaints.
• Collecting data for additional work and study. BF