Utility provider Eversource has again asked Connecticut regulators for permission to close its Simsbury work center, and two of the state’s top consumer protection officials have again objected.
The Simsbury area work center, located on Hopmeadow Road, is the 11th facility Eversource wants to close in Connecticut, following its 2012 merger with NStar. Seven have closed so far and an additional three have received approvals to close.
The Public Utilities Regulatory Authority last week reopened a docket to review the utility’s request.
Eversource has pledged to regulators that the closures — which have resulted in $2.2 million in savings to operations and maintenance costs this year — won’t affect workforce levels or response times and that they will create customer savings.
Eversource successfully won approval over the summer to close three facilities, including a Waterbury work center, a Glastonbury transmission service center and a storage, telecom and training building in Newington.
That decision came despite objections from Attorney General George Jepsen and Consumer Counsel Elin Swanson Katz, who argued that a previous round of seven facility closures around the state had resulted in a 26-position reduction to the utility’s Connecticut personnel.
In approving the three closures, PURA delayed a decision on Eversource’s request to close a fourth — the Simsbury work center. Regulators earlier this year said they needed more information on potential impacts to customer service and service outage response times.
On Oct. 15, Eversource submitted data regarding those metrics, and again asked PURA to give its blessing to the Simsbury closure.
On Oct. 22, Jepsen and Katz opposed Eversource’s motion, arguing that PURA should hold further proceedings to evaluate performance data.
None of the most recent three approved closings had yet occurred as of Oct. 15, Eversource said.
That data, according to Eversource’s filing last month, shows that Eversource’s first round of seven closures resulted in an average travel time in the quarter ended Aug. 31 of less than 34 minutes to customers located in the 25 communities that had previously been served by one of the closed facilities.
Eversource had previously stated a goal of achieving travel times of 45 minutes for between 90 percent and 95 percent of trips. Its results for the recent quarter equate to 85 percent of trips being completed within 45 minutes.
Jepsen and Swanson Katz cited that as one of their reasons to oppose the Simsbury closure.
But Eversource called its outcome significant and said it “substantially achieved the goal.”
As ordered by PURA, the data only measures utility drivers’ first call of the day from the work center, meaning that shorter trips later in the day were not counted, the company noted.
Jepsen and Swanson Katz also argued that Eversource only provided statewide service reliability data that doesn’t allow regulators to see any impacts from a previous closure of a New Milford facility.
They said both New Milford and Simsbury suffer from traffic congestion, so New Milford data should be applied to the Simsbury decision.
Additional information Eversource supplied to PURA to support its case:
- Its statewide customer average interruption duration index from January to September was 116 minutes, down from 119 minutes in 2014 and 125 minutes between 2010 and 2013.
- Its statewide system average interruption duration index was 57.2 minutes through September, down from 88.9 minutes last year and from 114.2 minutes between 2010 and 2013. The indices exclude major storms.
- The company completed all planned overhead line maintenance work in 2014 and is ahead of schedule on that work so far in 2015.
