Attorney General George Jepsen asked state regulators on Friday to fine Connecticut Light & Power up to $143 million for its deficient and inadequate response to the 2011 storms.
CL&P is seeking to recover $414 million in restoration and recovery costs from the storms in 2011 and 2012, including Tropical Storm Irene, the October 2011 nor’easter, and Superstorm Sandy. The Public Utilities Regulatory Authority will rule on how much of those costs CL&P can recover. A draft decision is expected in late December.
In investigating CL&P response to Irene and the nor’easter, PURA found the utility was deficient and inadequate to the more than 600,000 outages caused by the events, as some customers were without power for up to 11 days. In its investigative report, PURA said CL&P should be assessed a penalty by not being allowed to recover a portion of its storm costs.
In its filing to PURA for all of its 2011 and 2012 storm costs, CL&P said it incurred $111.2 million from Irene and $175.1 million for the nor’easter.
Jepsen said in his filing Friday that CL&P should suffer a 30-50 percent penalty of these Irene and nor’easter costs. That equates to $86 to $143 million.
In the investigative report, PURA allowed CL&P a way to not have to pay any additional fines, if the utility could prove it had made enough progress in its emergency response procedures to improve in future outages. CL&P claims to have done this.
CL&P already agreed to not pursue $40 million in storm recovery costs from Irene and the nor’easter, part of the agreements its parent company, Northeast Utilities, made to get Connecticut officials and regulators to approve its $5 billion merger with NStar.
