The neighbors of the Ten-Bel urbanization restore power supply since mid-afternoon yesterday. The restoration of the service occurs after the management company of the complex reached an agreement with Endesa and the marketer Eleia Energía, which will be announced to those affected during a meeting to be held next week. Yesterday all the generators that were activated since the supply cut occurred stopped working.
On December 29 last, Endesa cut the electricity to everything ten-bel because the company holding the contract, Ten Bel Turismo SL, had not paid for consumption for months. Ten hours later, already on December 30, those affected, some 1,500 families (more than 4,000 people), recovered the service through generators that have been in use for 43 days, a period in which some communities had difficulties to pay their rent and the fuel needed to keep them running.
The first community to receive the electrical supply It was Eureka, followed by Drago. It was expected that the power supply would be completely restored before midnight. The works began from the first hour, with the cleaning, revision and fine-tuning of the transformation centers of all the communities in order to proceed with the connection “one by one”.
Although the neighbors express satisfaction at recovering the service, they are aware that the difficulties have not disappeared. “This is bread for today and hunger for tomorrow,” summarized Tomás Expósito, from the Drago community. “Our objective seems to be unfeasible”, since “we will continue to have a single meter, which makes us continue to depend on those communities that cannot meet their consumption payments.” This forecast implies that the non-payment problem can be reproduced in a short time, they reflect. The proposal of those affected, as an ideal solution, is “to have individual accountants and that each community face its payments, but it seems unfeasible because the smaller ones do not have general accountants.”
Counter for each community
Ángel Cristóbal, administrator of the company Ten Bel Turismo SL, confirmed that the process is open to proceed to individualize the control of spending and payment by communities, in which the marketing company, the company Endesa, the General Directorate of Industry of the Government of the Canary Islands and the Arona City Council itself. «The marketer has advanced the individualization project, starting by applying it at the community level. Later, the possibility that each owner may have a personal contract will be evaluated, something complicated considering that Ten-Bel has tourist use, something that makes it difficult.
“It has cost us time, but the important thing is that the service is restored and bear in mind that we cannot fall into generating defaults, again,” explains Cristóbal. To do this, Eleia Energía establishes a prepayment “so that the monthly amount of the bill is covered,” he adds. Invoicing in which «a saving of 20% is produced with respect to the current one until now». The administrator explains that it is the immediate result of the arrival of the new marketer and the absence of defaults, in application of current regulations.
The essential measure
The replacement of the service materializes once Ten Bel Turismo SL and Endesa «reached an agreement to assume the debt. Another thing is that each one is passed on the part that corresponds to him ». In any case, “what we want is for the single meter to be broken and for each community to contract its meter with the marketer and for each one to be responsible for the consumption and the consequences of any non-payment without affecting the rest.”
Likewise, Ángel Cristóbal announces that the marketer “is considering other alternatives to have energy”, among which he mentions the use of renewables.
The availability of electricity supply during the last 43 days has had a high cost for the 1,500 families affected. The average expenditure per community is close to 30,000 euros, both to pay for fuel and to pay for the rental of the generators used.
