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TORONTO, Feb. 11 /CNW/ - Hydro One announced today it will open and staff a new work centre in the Orléans area to better serve the growing communities of Orléans, Navan and Rockland. The new work centre and additional power line maintainers and technicians will complement a series of $4 million in upgrades and improvements the Company has recently completed in Orléans. The work centre, expected to open later this year, will serve approximately 28,000 Hydro One customers in the Orléans area who had previously been served from Hydro One's Winchester and Vankleek Hill Offices. The new work centre and additional staff are being introduced to respond to projected growth and demand for services in this fast-growing Region.

The work to be performed at the Hydro One Work centre will include outage response, new customer connections and service upgrades, underground cable locates and several other maintenance activities.

The site for the new work centre has not been confirmed. The Company continues to seek a site that supports its efforts to improve response times by moving operations closer to its customer base. The Company expects the additional work centre will result in the creation of 18 new full time positions.

Hydro One has already carried out a number of electrical system upgrades since 2007 to add capacity and improve reliability in the Orléans area. In 2009, the Company installed a new feeder on Innes Road, replaced electrical equipment at a Hydro One station on Trim Road and replaced a significant number of poles and wires. Additional upgrades which were carried out include a new underground line between John Quinn Road and Parkway Road, which will improve reliability and help facilitate repairs should outages occur.

"We have made improvements to our Orléans area operations an important focus in recent years," said Laura Formusa, President and CEO, Hydro One. "Our ongoing investments in local electricity infrastructure and the establishment of a new work-centre are proof of Hydro One's commitment to investing in our system and providing a high level of service for our customers in the Orléans area."

"The people of Orléans expect and deserve the best possible service in return for their electricity rates," said Phil McNeely, MPP (Ottawa-Orléans). "We have been working on behalf of local ratepayers with Hydro One this past year to improve service and so we welcome their decision to establish a new work centre in Orléans."

According to census data, the Orléans area has grown from about 80,000 to more than 100,000 residents in the past decade, as many new communities have been added in the eastern section of Orléans.

Hydro One delivers electricity safely, reliably and responsibly to homes and businesses across the province of Ontario and owns and operates Ontario's 29,000 km high-voltage transmission network that delivers electricity to large industrial customers and municipal utilities, and a 123,000 km low-voltage distribution system that serves about 1.3 million end-use customers and smaller municipal utilities in the province. Hydro One is wholly owned by the Province of Ontario.