Enwin has found and addressed the issue of a higher-than-normal number of short, intermittent power interruptions in some specific neighbourhoods in Windsor’s east end.
Enwin delivered a report to city council Monday in response to Ward 7 Councillor Angelo Marignani raising the issue this past May after receiving complaints from residents in his ward, specifically in the East Riverside and Forest Glade neighbourhoods.
According to the report, the intermittent power interruptions occurred from late fall 2025 through spring 2026 but were due to two separate, unrelated issues, impacting the same customers during both periods.
Chief Operating Officer of the Hydro Division for Enwin Utilities, Jim Brown, says the issue in the fall was traced to a third-party generator customer that had a defective piece of equipment.
“That prevented our protective devices from making those outages really short, a sub-one-second time frame, and had forced those outages to extend five, six, or seven minutes,” he says.
The issue was corrected by the customer on January 14, 2026.
Brown says the intermittent power interruptions in the spring were traced to arcing in a switch in the distribution system, an issue that took a lot of time to discover.
“Normally we go out after an outage, and we patrol the lines and look for a cause. We’re not always able to find the cause because it has disappeared. It could be animal or vegetation contact or things like a metallic balloon blowing into a line,” he says.
Since that time, the feeder has operated as expected, and Enwin closed its investigation in early July.
Brown says they pride themselves on the reliability of their distribution system.
“We do operate in the lightning capital of Canada here, so it was really concerning to us. We know our customers have a high level of expectation for the reliability of their electric service, so it’s annoying to them to have these interruptions, and we regret the inconvenience,” he says.
The report says the customers most affected by the outages were located between Jefferson Boulevard and Robinet Lane, both north and south of Tecumseh Road. Because the distribution system in this area is interconnected, the same group of customers can be affected by different equipment issues, particularly when temporary operating arrangements are in place.