Ameren is the electricity provider for the st. louis region and parts of southern/southwestern illinois... so when i say Ameren you will know to whom i am referring...
with my power being out i have had a chance to think about a lot of things... nowhere can you turn in this city and not hear about the number of "customers" without power... these numbers are released by Ameren...
but what Ameren won't so quickly release, is their definition of a "customer"... when i hear 'customer' (and i am sure i am not alone on this) i think "person" - at least in this case... so when Ameren says it is failing to deliver power to 500,000 customers, i think 500,000 people without power... but with Ameren's definition of a customer, i am way off base and the magnitude of the problem becomes apparent and shocking when i translate an Ameren "customer" into a person...
Ameren defines a "customer" as a meter... so if you, billybob, aunt sue and uncle jeb all live under the same roof, you are all one Ameren "customer" because there is only one meter on the house... with this definition, it is easy to see how the numbers of affected can be easily down played...
here is a more accurate representation of the number of people affected:
according to the census of the metro area, there are approximately 1,013,341 household and 2,725,000 persons - an average of 2.69 people per household...
according to Ameren, during the peak of the storm, 341,000 household "customers" in the metro area were without electricity... when you apply the people per household factor you get 917,000 souls without electricity... 341,000 "Ameren 'customers'" vs 917,000 real people - that is a huge difference... basically one third of the metro's population was without electricity, but you would not have guessed that from Ameren's figures...
when the storms of July 2006 occured, Ameren had 700,000 "customers" without electricity - that's 1.88 million people without electricity... nearly 70% of the metro's population...
this is the second major outage in 6 months (and since i don't have the actual figures i won't include major outages from last year - i belive it is four over the last two years)... now, Ameren is asking people to be patient while it tries to restore power...
if you have ever experienced a st. louis summer, then you have sat in an oven waiting for your blood to boil... it is hot here in the summer...conversely, if you experience a true st. louis winter you will yearn for the blood boiling heat of summer (fall and spring usually miss us - we go from extreme to extreme)...
given this, how do you tell people who sweltered during the summer outage, and are now shivering in the cold, that they should be patient?... especially considering, that you are going to raise your rates, your weak infrastructure only exascerbate problems such as outages, you have cut back on the maintenance needed to temper the effects of a storm and you are the only provider of power in the area?...
i hope Ameren, your storm is yet to come....
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4 comments:
power cut again?
some people's power went out after it was restored...
some still hasn't had theirs restored..
One would think the power companies would talk to each other and anticipate stuff like this.
Back in the summer when half of Queens, NY was out of power for almost 2 weeks, this same "customer" issue came up. Queens is highly residential, with many homes being rented out as multiple apartments and electricity figured into the rent.
So when the mayor defined "customers" ConEd was forced to act even quicker since the number was almost 5 times what they had defined as "customers".
You would think that lesson learned would have been sung from the conventions of power companies, but I guess not.
i think i garnered that much from reading the post...i was just harassing u......:)
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