Attorney General George Jepsen called for “meaningful” penalties on Northeast Utilities and subsidiary Connecticut Light & Power Co., months after the company agreed to reimburse Connecticut ratepayers $30 million as recompense for widespread outages last fall in the wake of Tropical Storm Irene and the October nor”™easter.
In a first quarter conference call, Northeast Utilities indicated it would seek to recover some of its storm costs over a six-year period, in a rate case before the Connecticut Public Utilities Regulatory Authority. In a 54-page brief filed with PURA Monday, Jepsen said ratepayers should not have to foot the bill for the company’s errors, and that a bigger penalty would encourage it to respond better in future storms.
“The company”™s worst-case scenario emergency response plan only prepared for 100,000 power outages; they had no plan whatsoever for outages on the scale that we saw not once in 2011, but twice,” Jepsen said in a written 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,” he said.
