KINGSTON, Jamaica — The Office of Utilities Regulation (OUR) has insisted that the Jamaica Public Service Company Limited (JPS) did not provide it with notice or information prior to the implementation of its ‘Transformer Protection Programme’ pilot project.

In a release, the OUR Director-General, Ansord Hewitt, stated that “it is instructive that in none of the correspondences with the OUR on the matter, has JPS claimed or intimated that it had previously informed the OUR of this programme.” 

In the statement, Hewitt urged JPS board member and the Government’s Representative, Danville Walker, to clarify comments he made about the OUR’s knowledge about the project. In a published media interview on October 23, 2021, Walker insisted that the OUR was knowledgeable about the Transformer Protection Programme, which has drawn wide-scale complaints of frequent and prolonged power outages in the affected communities.

In its own response to questions from the OUR about the prolonged outages, JPS stated that no formal notification was given to its customers in advance of specific events.

“Mr Walker needs to state whether he is making those comments in his personal capacity or whether they represent the assertion of the JPS’s board. Either way, the claim and imputation are patently false. Notwithstanding, the OUR’s investigation continues,” Hewiit’s statement read.

The OUR directed that JPS’s ‘Transformer Protection Programme’ pilot project be suspended for 90 days (in the first instance), from 2021 October 15, to allow the OUR to complete an investigation and publish its findings.

JPS revealed last week that it had initiated a Transformer Protection pilot project to protect its equipment from huge unpredictable overload and premature failure due to recurring equipment failure and spiralling replacement costs.