Pepco may soon cease to be the primary energy provider in Montgomery County. After the recent snowstorm left over 180,000 Maryland Pepco customers without power for days, the Montgomery County Council met Feb. 7 to consider replacing the company.The biggest cause of the public outcry weren’t the outages themselves. Rather, it was Pepco’s service, or lack thereof, during the storm.

“When we called Pepco there was just a recorded message,” said junior Shruti Gujaran, who lost power for 2.5 days during the February snowstorm. “It just made my family feel helpless. If they’re going to have a monopoly in the area then they should have preventative measures in place.”

This isn’t the first time community members have complained about Pepco’s service; last year a record-breaking snowfall left thousands of homes without power.

Pepco is currently the default energy distributor in Montgomery County, and while residents do have the option of requesting an alternate provider, the overwhelming majority of county residents use Pepco, Pepco’s Clay Anderson said.

Because Pepco merely distributes electricity and doesn’t produce it, the county could potentially assume its role and regulate energy distribution, like it does with public roads, said Dale Tibbitts, a representative for County Council member Marc Erlich.

If the County Council chooses to pursue the idea, it would conduct a feasibility study to determine the exact procedure required to replace Pepco and assume responsibility of the job. From this, the council would investigate the legal process and costs of such an action. The process may include changes in state legislation or fees to compensate Pepco, Tibbits said.

The county’s feasibility study would take several months and cost around $100,000, Tibbitts said.

The Maryland Public Service Commission, which operates government oversight of Pepco, also raised concern in a memo that Pepco may have charged residents for power line repairs when they lost power, as part of company policy. The memo stated that if the business is still generating revenue during outages, it wouldn’t have enough incentive to restore power efficiently.

Pepco hopes to continue its service in Montgomery County and improve performance in the future through a six-point reliability plan including trimming trees, burying wires underground and automating data.