T&TEC to pay customers rebate No electricity for 10 hours at a time
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THE TRINIDAD and Tobago Electricity Commission (T&TEC) will now have to pay customers a minimum rebate of $60 if their power supplies are unexpectedly interrupted for more than 10 hours at a time. This mandate was passed on to the commission by the Regulated Industries Commission, (RIC), the overseer for electricity transmission and distribution, on December 19 last year. Commercial and Industrial customers will meanwhile be rebated ten times the amount residential customers will be paid. The RIC mandated that T&TEC tack on a $600 credit to the customer’s bill if the standards for repairs and queries set by the RIC is not fulfilled. Should a company be left without lights for more than ten hours, T&TEC will then owe them $600 for every additional 12 hours beyond the first 10-hour period. House owners will get $60 for every additional 12 hours after their first 10 hours in the dark. In a press release yesterday, the RIC said the new guidelines are to ensure citizens are appropriately compensated and show ’several improvements over the old standards’. Asked in a telephone interview yesterday evening whether the new compensation laws will be applied to areas T&TEC workers claim are high risk and refuse to go into without police protection, T&TEC chairman, Clement Imbert, said, ’The RIC does not discriminate.’ He said regardless of area, the company will reimburse its customers if their service is interrupted. Asked whether these new stipulations meant that the service which T&TEC offers will be drastically improved, Imbert said, ’T&TEC already offers excellent value and excellent service.’ He said in the last few years, the company has been consistently working at reducing the amount of time it takes to repair electricity interruptions. Imbert also said thet measuring how much money T&TEC had to repay a customer would not be difficult. ’We are able to measure when an outage occurs. We have monitoring systems.’ (Trinidad Express) |