Oh Pepco, when will we get over our on again/off again relationship? Too often we’ve been left in the dark by your absence and you’ve ruffled one too many feathers because of it.

Ward 7 D.C. council member Yvette Alexander wants the District’s Public Service Commission to take a hard look at Pepco‘s recent spike of power outages across the area, going as far as calling the company’s service “subpar.” The increased scrutiny stems from an outage last week that left the downtown NoMa business district in the dark for two days. Pepco asserts that outages are rectified mostly within minutes or hours, however this latest blackout has drawn the ire of many business owners, residents and D.C. government officials. “You can’t guarantee 100 percent service is never going to go out,” said Pepco President Tom Graham to NBC4 while on site during repairs.

Pepco is not a newcomer when it comes to receiving flak for its reliability and performance. Earlier this year Maryland officials has called into question its reliability standards imposed on utility companies, for the most part highlighting Pepco’s poor track record, and the penalties they incur. Run of the mill outages aside, many have questioned the utility’s response to outages after snow/rain/wind storms, which has been less than ideal.

With the summer quick approaching — if it hasn’t already arrived — the load on our city’s power infrastructure will once again be at it’s limit and we can only hope that Pepco gets its act together before tensions really start to boil over.