Attorney General George Jepsen on Monday has filed a brief with the Connecticut Public Utilities Regulatory Authority asking that Connecticut Light & Power not be able to pass costs from two major storms, caused by what he referred to as "imprudence," onto ratepayers.
Hundreds of thousands of people were left without power for several days after Tropical Storm Irene and again when the freak October storm hit.
The utility company's "worst case scenario" for emergency response was that 100,000 people would lose power, but more than 700,000 customers lost power during Tropical Storm Irene, some for as long as nine days. The Nor’easter interrupted electric service to more than 800,000, many for as long as 11 days.
“CL&P failed to prepare for major weather events, failed in its assessments and failed to adequately communicate with the public and public officials,” AG Jepsen said in a statement. “Connecticut residents and businesses were left stranded in the wake of two of the largest storm-related power outages to ever affect our state because of CL&P’s failures. Any costs related to CL&P’s imprudence should in no way be passed on to ratepayers.”
Jepsen is asking PURA to "disallow the recovery from ratepayers of a substantial portion, in the range of 30 to 50 percent, of CL&P’s 2011 storm restoration and recovery costs."
He also said that PURA should consider reducing CL&P’s return on equity in a future rate-making proceeding, "both as a penalty and as a strong warning to the company to improve its management practices."
“This investigation gives us the opportunity to reverse a trend of mismanagement and unpreparedness in our utility companies,” he said. “In the case of CL&P, I firmly believe that those penalties must be large enough to be meaningful and to strongly incentivize the company to improve its performance.”
In Jepsen's 54-page brief, he said CL&P was imprudent with regard to inadequate preparation for major storms, failure to request the assistance of outside crews in a timely manner, unreasonable damage assessment process, failure to train and support municipal liaisons and defer to local restoration priorities, unreasonable development of estimated restoration times, and mismanagement of communications with the public and public officials concerning estimated restoration times.
At the end of last month, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and North American Electric Reliability Corp. released results from their study, which found that downed trees rather than transmission system outages were largely to blame for widespread power outages.
