By John Stang
Utilities Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric have agreed to trim $775 million from the $3.3 billion charge to ratepayers for the premature closure of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS), according to a settlement announced Tuesday.
That translates to $68 per SCE residential customer over the next four years, the company said in a press release.
The California Public Utilities Commission must still approve the settlement reached between SONGS’ owners and a number of consumer organizations. The commission is taking public comments on the proposal through March 1, and is likely to hold at least one public hearing on the matter.
“The parties undertook extensive efforts over many months to reach agreement and SCE looks forward to timely regulatory approval.” Ron Nichols, president of SONGS majority owner Southern California Edison, said in the press release.
SDG&E also touted the agreement in a separate statement, but cautioned that CPUC might still reject the settlement.
Other terms of the proposed settlement:
- Customers will receive refunds for any charges collected by the two utilities above the $775 million while the settlement awaits a decision before CPUC.
- Plaintiffs to a lawsuit against the 2014 settlement will dismiss the case once CPUC signs off on the new deal.
- SDG&E will receive a $151 million reimbursement from SCE for its portion of the $775 million.
The San Onofre nuclear plant began operations in 1968, with reactor Unit 1 shutting down in 1992 and Units 2 and 3 being permanently taken offline in 2013 due to faulty steam generators.
In 2014, CPUC approved a settlement that passed $3.3 billion of the $4.7 billion in closure costs on to ratepayers, the SONGS’ owners paying the rest. That agreement was the result of negotiations by Southern California Edison, San Diego Gas & Electric, the California Office of Ratepayer Advocates, The Utility Reform Network, Friends of the Earth, and the Coalition of California Utility Employees.
However, the original settlement quickly led to the federal lawsuit and reporting from the San Diego Union-Tribune that top officials from CPUC and SCE had conducted ex-parte talks to secretly hammer out the details of the 2014 agreement. The Public Utilities Commission in 2015 fined SCE nearly $17 million for failing to report the talks, and the next year reopened the settlement.
That eventually led to an extended round of negotiations by the parties to the original settlement and a number of additional organizations, including California State University and the watchdog group Citizens’ Oversight. Reporting in mid-January indicated a new settlement had been reached.
The utilities otherwise remain focused on decommissioning San Onofre and finding a permanent solution to its spent fuel. Southern California in 2016 hired an AECOM-EnergySolutions team as the $1 billion general contractor for what is expected to be a $4.4 billion decommissioning project lasting over a decade.
A separate lawsuit from Aguirre and Severson, on behalf of Citizens’ Oversight and a local resident, had challenged SCE’s plan to store more than 3.5 million pounds of used reactor fuel from SONGS in dry casks near the Pacific coast. Fuel from Unit 1 is already in place there, and the storage pad would be expanded to accommodate the spent fuel from the other two reactors.
An August 2017 settlement allowed SCE to move ahead with moving the waste into on-site storage while it takes a number of steps to move the material to an off-site location. However, another organization, Public Watchdog, sued in November to block storage of spent fuel at the SONGS site.
