The Town of Essex has sold all of its E.L.K Energy Inc. shares to the ENWIN Group of Companies.
The sale is expected to improve service in the region using ENWIN's advanced technologies and expertise.
"It has been a really common complaint since before this term of council about the frequency of flickers and outages," said Essex Mayor Sherry Bondy. "We have old infrastructure, old poles, old lines and we've done everything we can to fix that but this will fix that faster."
As part of the agreement, ENWIN has agreed to keep an office presence in the county and transition all staff.
"The goal is to have better improvements for our residents that currently live here, for our businesses that are here and for our future residents that want to come here," said Bondy.
E.L.K. customers will continue to receive bill from E.L.K. for at least 12 months. All changes will be communicated with the customers.
"This is the beginning, we've got a lot of work on our hands. Obviously we need to get a lay of the land, we need to understand, roll up our sleeves and start creating plans for how we are going to make the system more reliable and more resilient," said Garry Rossi, President and CEO of Enwin Utilities.
Rossi indicated bringing on E.L.K. staff will help customers in Essex, Lakeshore, Kingsville and Windsor.
"We have our 24/7 control room which is our storm response and really this is going to be an additional benefit to us. We're going to have more crews so depending on where the issue is if it's in Essex or if it's in the Windsor area, we're going to be able to respond with more crews, improve reliability and uptime to get those outages back on," said Rossi.
The sale was made through a competitive process by the board.
The sale still needs to go through a regulatory process to finalize the transaction.