Since his appointment in 2008, Chris Ambler has overseen hundreds of millions of pounds of investment in the Island’s energy infrastructure.
After the Island experienced a number of power cuts following the failure of two submarine-cable connections with France in 2011, he said the company had taken steps to bolster supplies by installing two new submarine cables, with a combined value of £110 million – in addition to an existing interconnector.
And a new £12 million primary substation is currently being constructed in St Helier on the lower slope of Westmount Gardens to safeguard supplies in town.
Mr Ambler said: ‘We are in a much more secure place now than the company has ever been before in terms of how resilient our infrastructure is.
‘We have got three interconnectors from France, across two diverse routings. One of the cables is buried completely under the seabed and connects to a different part of the French network from the other two.
‘We have, of course, got La Collette, which is a standby generating facility, so if there is a problem with the French network we can fire that up.
‘So we are better placed than ever before, but incidents do happen, and I say to all my customers that we cannot give a cast-iron guarantee over security of supply.’
According to power regulator Ofgem, for every 1,000 customers, just under 50 experienced an outage in the UK last year.
However, Mr Ambler said that Jersey’s network was more reliable.
He added: ‘Last year, we had an all-Island power cut, and even with that, we were still three times more reliable than the UK. From the beginning of the financial year on 1 October through to the end of April, we were around ten times more reliable than the UK.’
Mr Ambler added that his company could try to make Jersey’s network absolutely fail-safe but that it would not be economically viable.
He said: ‘What we say to customers is that if they are operating critical services and processes, they need to do their own risk assessments around those and decide for themselves what the appropriate mitigation might be.
‘That is much more efficient than me investing hundreds of millions of pounds to effectively gold-plate a network. If I was to try to do that it would cost a lot of money to the point where it would fundamentally weaken the economics of the product.’
