By Wayne Barber
The parties to the 2014 ratepayer settlement for the premature retirement of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) told the California Public Utilities Commission on Aug. 15 that they have failed to negotiate a compromise on potential revisions to the deal.
The commission had given the parties until that date to hammer out any revisions to the deal amongst themselves.
A CPUC panel reopened the $4.7 billion settlement in May 2016 after learning that former commission President Michael Peevey had prior to the agreement conducted ex-parte talks with a then-executive with SONGS majority owner Southern California Edison (SCE). The utility and minority owner San Diego Gas & Electric would charge customers roughly $3.3 billion under the original deal after the plant closed permanently in 2013 due to issues with two steam generators.
Parties to the settlement included Southern California Edison, the state Office of Ratepayer Advocates, and nongovernmental groups The Utility Reform Network (TURN) and the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility (A4NR).
In addition to telephone discussions, the parties met three times directly and then four times with a mediator, but were unable to agree on changes to the prior agreement, SCE said. With the deadline passed, “significant differences remain,” A4NR attorney John Geesman said in a filing with CPUC.
Legal representatives for the parties wasted no time in saying how they think the commission should proceed from here.
Southern California Edison wants CPUC to uphold the original terms, and said in a filing that any revisions should be minimal because any impact of any ex-parte communication was minimal.
Likewise, SDG&E deemed the existing settlement good for customers and asked the CPUC to affirm it and close the proceeding.
SCE argued that ORA and TURN, which were the chief non-utility parties in negotiations on the settlement, had initially strongly supported the deal – even after learning of the 2013 meeting in Poland between Peevey and then-SCE executive Stephen Pickett.
In its Aug. 15 filing, TURN urged the state commission to conduct litigation to resolve remaining disputed issues. For example, SCE appeared to favor closing SONGS over restart in part because retirement would shift financial risk away from shareholders — and on to ratepayers, the group said. The commission should not allow the utilities to collect any more money on the prior settlement, TURN added.
TURN also wants CPUC to declare that the utilities’ decision to prematurely close SONGS was imprudent, which could have major implications for recovering consumers’ costs.
While CPUC has already penalized SCE $16.74 million for the private communication, the money was deposited in the state general fund and not set aside to support ratepayers of SCE and SDG&E, TURN said.
