Reliable electricity starts behind the scenes, in the equipment that keeps power flowing across Oshawa. This fall, Oshawa Power is completing upgrades at Municipal Substation #7 (MS7) with advanced eHouse switchgear technology, a key investment that will strengthen the reliability and safety of our city’s power supply for years to come.

Why Substations Matter

Municipal Substations are the backbone of Oshawa’s local grid. They receive high-voltage electricity from Ontario’s provincial system and convert it to lower voltages for safe delivery to homes and businesses.

MS7, located at Simcoe Street North and Taunton Road East, has been serving customers for nearly six decades. Like any essential infrastructure, its electrical equipment reaches a point where replacement is necessary to maintain reliability and avoid unplanned outages.

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What’s Changing at MS7

Oshawa Power’s new eHouse switchgear represents the next generation of electrical infrastructure:

• Modular and prefabricated: Built off-site, tested, and delivered ready for plug-and-play installation.
• Compact and efficient: Fits seamlessly into the existing substation footprint.
• Enhanced safety: Provides better protection for staff and equipment.
• Future-ready: Designed to integrate with digital monitoring and smart grid technologies.

Work on MS7 began in 2025 and will be completed by December. This marks the second of four planned switchgear replacements under Oshawa Power’s long-term Capital Rebuild Plan.

The Bigger Picture

This project is part of Oshawa Power’s proactive Municipal Substation Switchgear Replacement Program. By replacing aging infrastructure before failure, we reduce outage risks, improve reliability, and prepare the grid for future energy needs including electric vehicles, distributed generation, and smart grid expansion.

“These upgrades are part of our commitment to maintaining a strong, modern, and resilient power system for Oshawa. Investing in infrastructure today means greater reliability and fewer disruptions tomorrow.”

– Peter Petriw, Director, Engineering & Operations

What It Means For You

For customers fed by MS7 and even across the rest of our grid, this upgrade means:

• Fewer unplanned outages
• Greater grid stability during extreme weather
• Long-term reliability as the city continues to grow

Oshawa Power continues to invest in critical infrastructure that keeps your lights on, your devices powered, and your city moving forward.

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Oshawa Power has appointed four new members to its Board of Directors. The Board of Directors will play a key role in advancing the organization’s 2025 to 2030 strategic plan, supporting priorities in green energy, long-term value creation, infrastructure services, and building a high-performing team.

Key Highlights:

• Four new directors appointed: Paul Kwasnik, Charles Mongeon, Mika Unterman, and Tova White
• Added leadership capacity across energy, technology, sustainability, and HR
• Stronger governance support for Oshawa Power’s strategic plan.

Meet Our New Directors

Paul Kwasnik, BA, MBA

Paul brings more than 30 years of experience in the energy sector, including nine years as CEO and President of Brantford Energy Corporation. His work focused on modernization, operational efficiency, regulatory strategy, asset management, and customer service.

Charles Mongeon

Charles is a technology executive and governance professional with over 30 years of experience across energy, telecom, and retail. His background spans enterprise resilience, digital transformation, and IT governance.

Mika Unterman

Mika is known for her systems thinking and commitment to circular economy solutions. She currently serves as Director of Sustainability Capabilities and Planning at The Coca-Cola Company in Canada and has led projects across consumer goods, education, and technology.

Tova White, MSc., C. Dir

Tova brings over 25 years of experience in human resources leadership across retail, financial services, and consumer packaged goods. Her work includes major transformations at Giant Tiger, Coca-Cola Canada, Chapters, Indigo, and BMO.

“We are pleased to welcome the new directors to the Board and are confident their diverse experience and governance expertise will be instrumental as we advance our five-year strategic plan. Their contributions will enhance the Board’s oversight and support our commitment to delivering sustainable value for our stakeholders.”

– Daniel Arbour, President & CEO

Thank You to Outgoing Board Members

Oshawa Power extends sincere appreciation to departing board members Denise Carpenter, Grant Buchanan, Terry Caputo, and Donna Kingelin. Their leadership helped move the Board from an operational model to a skills-based governance structure.

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Starting November 1, 2025, new electricity pricing from the Ontario Energy Board (OEB) will come into effect across Ontario.

These changes will affect the the ‘Electricity’ line of your bill and will have no impact on ‘Delivery’ or ‘Regulatory’ charges. To learn more about the charges that make up your monthly electricity bill, visit our Understanding Your Bill page.

Alongside the OEB’s rate changes, November 1 will mark the shift to the Winter Schedule for customers on the Time-of-Use (TOU), Tiered, and Ultra-Low Overnight (ULO) pricing plans.

The Winter Schedule will remain in effect until May 1, 2026 when customers will see the return of the summer pricing schedule.

New RPP rates and usage schedules for each pricing plan are outlined in the following charts:

November 1, 2025 Electricity Rates

For a full schedule of past electricity pricing, visit the OEB’s Historical Electricity Rates page.

Ontario Energy Rebate (OER) Increasing

To help residential and small business customers offset the cost of this rate increase, the province has announced an increase in the Ontario Energy Rebate (OER) from 13.1% to 23.5%.

This rebate is applied as a pre-tax rebate and will show up as a single line item on your electricity bill. For an average residential customer using about 700 kWh of electricity per month, the rebate will be approximately $36, up from about $17 before the OER increase.

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Oshawa Power Group of Companies is pleased to announce the appointment of Amanda Tang as Chief Financial Officer, effective April 1, 2025.

Amanda brings extensive expertise in performance and risk management, transformation execution, and team development. As a seasoned strategic business partner and advisor, she has played a key role in shaping the vision and strategy of both established organizations and high-growth start-ups, particularly across the Real Estate, Energy/Utility, and Financial sectors. In her new role, Amanda will support Oshawa Power in enhancing financial and operational performance, mitigating risk, and solving complex business challenges.

Before joining Oshawa Power, Amanda held progressively senior roles in finance and risk management, most recently serving as SVP, Finance, Strategy, and Risk at Blackstone Energy Services. Her career also includes leadership positions at Fidelity Canada and major financial institutions such as BMO, CIBC, and National Bank Financial.

Amanda holds an Honours Bachelor of Mathematics and a Master of Accounting from the University of Waterloo, as well as a Master of Laws from Osgoode Hall Law School. She is a Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA, CA).

Oshawa, ON – Oshawa Power supports the call for Canadian goods and materials, prioritizing procurement from domestic suppliers and vendors.

Serving one of Canada’s fastest-growing municipalities, Oshawa Power supplies electricity to more than 63,000 residential and commercial customers. Committed to a “local first” purchasing philosophy, the company invests over 95% of its budget with Canadian suppliers and vendors.

As part of its commitment to resource stewardship and advocacy, Oshawa Power is strengthening its procurement process to further prioritize Canadian vendors where possible. The company’s upcoming capital investments will focus on enhancing safety and reliability through projects designed to enhance our smart-grid technology.

“Strengthening our domestic supply chain will continue to be a priority during these uncertain times.”

– Daniel Arbour, President & CEO, Oshawa Power

By adopting a “Canada-first” approach, Oshawa Power is reinforcing its commitment to a resilient supply chain while delivering safe, reliable, and affordable electricity to its customers. We encourage all of our partners to use Canadian made components in their supply chain where possible.

For more information, please visit our Supply Chain page.

About Oshawa Power

Oshawa Power is dedicated to the evolving needs of our customers as a leading enabler of integrated critical energy and infrastructure. Oshawa Power is wholly owned by the great City of Oshawa.

Media Contact

Communications@oshawapower.ca

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As our community continues to grow and electrification increases energy demand, Oshawa Power is committed to ensuring a more reliable, resilient, and efficient electrical grid to power our city’s future. Our investments in SmartGrid technology, integrating automation and realtime analytics, has led to significant improvements in outage duration and frequency and better service for customers across Oshawa.

A Smarter, Stronger Grid for Oshawa

Traditional power grids were designed decades ago and relied on manual intervention to detect and fix outages. Today, with the implementation of Fault Location, Isolation, and Service Restoration (FLISR) technology, we’ve made significant advancements in how we respond to power disruptions. Integrating automation, sensors, and data-driven insights, our SmartGrid allows us to identify faults quickly, reroute power, and restore service faster than ever before.

The Impact: Measurable Improvements in Reliability

Our investment in FLISR integration has already delivered impressive results:

• 78% reduction in yearly average customer downtime (System Average Interruption Duration Index – SAIDI) from 88 minutes to 19 minutes since 2022.



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• 72% decrease in yearly outages per customer (System Average Interruption Frequency Index – SAIFI) from 1.04 to 0.28 since 2022.



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• Faster outage response times, reducing downtime for homes and businesses.
• Improved communication during outages through our live Outage Map and social media channels.

Enhancing Our Service & Supporting Electrification

Our grid modernization efforts aren’t just about reliability. We are focused on meeting the needs of our customers and preparing for a more sustainable, increasingly electrified future. Through realtime monitoring and predictive maintenance, Oshawa Power can optimize load distribution to meet our community’s needs while minimizing disruptions.

Key benefits include:

• Customers receive faster, more accurate outage notifications.
• More sustainable energy management in preparation for increases in adoption of renewable energy sources like solar and battery storage.
• Support for electric vehicles as adoption grows and electricity consumption shifts.

What’s Next?

Since launching with 8% of our grid integrated in December 2021, our FLISR system has expanded to cover 40% of our local electrical grid. As part of our Strategic Asset Management Plan, every new build, rebuild, and capital project will be integrated with a goal of 100% integration, ensuring continuous improvement in service reliability and grid resiliency.

Our journey toward a smarter, more reliable local SmartGrid is just beginning. By combining automation, data analytics, and a customer-focused approach, Oshawa Power is striving to set a new benchmark for electricity reliability in Ontario.

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Oshawa Power customers experienced 83% less downtime than the average customer in Ontario.

In 2024, Oshawa’s local electric grid posted one of our best years on record and we’re excited to share the highlights with you. This year, we once again posted a near-perfect reliability score, ensuring that power continued flowing to your homes and businesses with minimal interruption. While our team’s hard work on system upgrades and grid management have laid the foundation for this success, we have to admit — we also got a little lucky with the weather and fewer unexpected challenges than we’ve experienced in the past. 🍀

Let’s dive into some key numbers and take a look at what made 2024 such a strong year for our system’s reliability:

Reliability Score: 99.99%

Just like our customers have come to expect, we once again posted a near-perfect Reliability Score of 99.99%, or what is known as ‘four nines’ in our industry, the golden standard for reliability.

While we came even closer to a 100% score in 2024, realistically near-perfect is the best that we can aim for. Through our long-term planning, our team has made significant upgrades to our local electricity grid including investing in building one of Ontario’s leading SmartGrids (approx. 40% of Oshawa’s grid is integrated), replacing aging infrastructure, and developing programs to mitigate animal and tree contact outages. These strategies have laid the foundation for one of Ontario’s most reliable local grids but can never protect our infrastructure from external risk factors like extreme weather, lightning, or motor vehicle accidents.

Average Number of Outages: 0.28

Based on our System Average Interruption Frequency Index (SAIFI) metric, Oshawa Power customers experience just 0.28 outages in 2024.

What does this number mean? This metric means that approx. 3 in 4 Oshawa Power customers didn’t experience a single outage during the past year!

Average Yearly Downtime: 19 Minutes

In 2024, we surpassed 63,000 customers. From the smallest bachelor apartments to large manufacturing plants, actual downtime and outages experienced throughout the year varies. But on average, the residents and businesses that call Oshawa home experienced an average of just 19 minutes in the dark.

Oshawa Power customers experience much less downtime than the Ontario average:

Ensuring that our city doesn’t get left in the dark is fundamental to our success. Not only is this measure important to us but based on your feedback from our 2024 Customer Priority Survey, this is what matters most to you. We were proud to post our best performance on record during 2024!

Outage Response Time: 34 Minutes

When the power goes out, you count on us to act. In 2024, our team’s response averaged just over half an hour.

You may have noticed that this is higher than previous years. Last year, we adjusted how we measure our response time to more accurately account for the time it takes to be onsite to begin restoration of a sustained outage. Previously, this metric included the automated response to momentary outages and we made this adjustment to increase transparency and provide a realistic expectation for you, our customer. Our 34 minute response time will act as our baseline moving into 2025.

With our team always at the ready, we know that a swift response is crucial to your satisfaction. When an issue occurs and your family is left without power, you can be sure our team is springing into action, from our Control Room to our crews, to investigate, determine the issue, and safely restore power as soon as possible and get your lights back on.

Total Number of Outages: 413

Over the course of the year, our grid saw a grand total of 413 outages ranging from a single service to our largest outage affecting more than 3,300 customers. This number includes all outages, planned and unplanned.

Momentary Outages: 88

Those dreaded brief flickers that knock the power out just long enough to mess with your clocks are what we refer to as ‘momentaries’. And trust us, we know these can be a nuisance, but in reality these are the sign of our grid doing what it is designed to do.

Momentary outages occur when our grid automation is at work to avoid a potentially larger, and lengthier outage. With self healing and isolating technologies expanding across more of our city’s grid, these devices are designed to help us detect outages as soon as they happen and automatically restore service to as many homes as businesses as possible almost instantly. This allows us to isolate the smallest possible area affected by the ongoing issue while our team gets to work on repairs and restoration.

Top Outage Cause: Foreign Interference

In 2024, approximately 32% of all outages were classified as being caused by Foreign Interference:

We know it may sound scary but Foreign Interference is nothing to fret over! This classification captures outages that are caused when an object that shouldn’t be in contact with our infrastructure does make contact, causing a fault and a corresponding outage and includes things like animal contacts and motor vehicle accidents.

Largest Outage: June 26th (3,303 customers)

The largest outage of the year occurred on June 26th in the wee hours of the morning. The outage was caused by a large tree limb falling on our lines in the area of Ritson Rd. and Given Rd. around 3 a.m. This interference caused a fault that left 3,303 customers without power for almost 3 hours.

Under normal circumstances, our grid would have been able to isolate the issue and automatically restore most customers affected in a short timeframe. However, ongoing maintenance left our system unable to reroute power and isolate the issue, causing an extended outage for all affected customers.

Despite this hurdle, our on call crews jump into action and dispatched to the area. After patrolling the lines and pinpointing the issue, teams went to work on the removal of the limb and repairs to our infrastructure, restoring power to our customers just before sunrise!

Other Notable Outages:

January 1st

We didn’t have to wait long for the first notable outage of 2024. On January 1st a primary cable fault briefly left a small chunk of our city without power. However our team was able to restore service in less than an hour and (luckily!) this outage was not a sign of things to come…

June 10th

After making it through winter and much of the spring without any major events, increasing wildlife activity as we transitioned to summer caused our next notable issue. On June 10th a squirrel made contact with our lines, causing a fault that knocked power out to a large number of customers. Despite the relatively large area affected, the outage didn’t last long as crews were able to complete restoration very quickly!

July 16th

Another tree contact outage, this time our system was operating under normal conditions and was able to isolate the issue, restoring most customers quickly. Crews were once again called into action to remove debris and restore service to the area directly affected.

September 8th

The second largest outage of the year occurred right as the summer was coming to a close. On September 8th a transmission line was dislodged, falling on and becoming intertwined with one of our 44KV lines.

Knocking out a key feeder, this outage left more than 3,000 customers in South and West Oshawa without power. Our crews worked together with the team from Hydro One to clear the fallen line and make repairs, restoring service to most customers in about an hour!

Looking Forward

As we move forward into an increasingly connected future, we understand the role we play in making sure our customers are connected to local grid they can count in. We will continue to pursue advancements to our grid including the further development and implementation of our SmartGrid and additional system upgrades to replace aging infrastructure. In 2025, we will also complete our 3-year Vegetation Management Plan, focusing on Oshawa’s eastern neighbourhoods.

Heading into the new year, we’re not slowing down. We’ll continue investing in technology, upgrading our grid, and finding new ways to make your power even more reliable.

Thanks for trusting us to keep our city’s lights on for more than 130 years. Here’s to another great year together!

To compare how we measure up to LDCs across the province and our own previous performance, check out the OEBs Scorecard Comparison Tool.

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Thank you to the more than 2,000 customers who dedicated their time and knowledge to completing our electricity plan survey. We deeply value your feedback, which is critical in helping us understand your priorities. As we move forward with finalizing our 2026-2030 electricity plan and filing it with the Ontario Energy Board, your insights allow us to align our efforts with your needs and expectations, ensuring we plan to deliver the community the highest reliable and quality service at an affordable rate.

Your participation demonstrates your commitment to shaping the future of our services, and we are truly grateful for your valuable contribution. An analysis of the more than 1500 comments received revealed three trends: more communication is desired, our customers are cost-sensitive, and a renewed focus on customer service is needed. As result, our plan will include investing in our communications and customer service while continuing to offer low electricity rates when compared to other Ontario electricity utilities.

Overall, you think positively about us as your utility:

• 78% believe Oshawa Power is a financially responsible business
• 81% think Oshawa Power fosters a positive culture in its interactions with its customers
• 93% believe that Oshawa Power considers safety as paramount in its operations and in regard to the public
• 86% view Oshawa Power as an environmentally responsible business
• 88% responded with appropriate, well or very well when asked “How well do you think Oshawa Power is planning for the future?”

As thanks, congratulations to our two winners who each won a $250 Amazon Gift card – right in time for the holiday season!

If you have any additional thoughts or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to visit our project page with contact information. We are always here to listen and learn.

Thank you and Happy Holidays!

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