AUGUSTA, Maine — A state watchdog wants regulators to withhold nearly half of the $117 million that Central Maine Power Co. has requested to cover 2022 storm response costs, leading the company to call the idea “outrageous and irresponsible.”
The showdown between Public Advocate William Harwood and the state’s largest utility will force the Maine Public Utilities Commission to delve deeply into the high costs of storm recovery. CMP has tried for years to rebuild its reputation after years of customer service woes, and a November referendum would replace it and another major utility with an elected board.
Maine ratepayers generally cover storm response costs, but state law allows regulators to refuse to reimburse expenses that are deemed unreasonable or imprudent. Harwood’s office says that standard applies to $53.6 million in costs that are largely the result of overstaffing.
The ratepayer advocate said in a Wednesday filing with the regulator that CMP exceeded staffing guidelines in 12 of 23 storms that the utility wants to be reimbursed for, including a winter storm that left tens of thousands without power in Maine just before Christmas.
CMP says it spent nearly $58 million responding to that storm alone, and it retained 637 crews to do so. The per-customer cost of that response was more than ten times higher than that of Versant Power, the other dominant Maine utility with roughly one-fourth the number of CMP’s customers, noted Jesse Houck, an analyst for Harwood’s office.
But the utility shot back in a statement saying power restorations that took three days during that storm may have taken a week or more if it adhered to standards, citing studies that show low-income customers are harmed most by longer outages. It stood by the position, calling Harwood’s stance amounts to wanting to “leave Mainers in the dark.”
“Faced with another federally declared disaster like Winter Storm Elliott, in which hundreds of thousands of Mainers were without power over the Christmas holiday, our response would have been the same every time,” CMP spokesperson Jon Breed said in a statement.
In an interview, Harwood said it appears that there is a mandate at CMP to spend heavily to respond to storms. While customers may be grateful for that at the moment, he said it is leading to a situation in which the cleanup bills are not getting the public attention they deserve.
His goal is for the utilities commission to take a more active role in determining a range of costs according to the severity of storms. If utilities need to exceed those limits, he said they should be able to explain why the costs are so significant.
“At the end of the day, what we want is some government guidance to CMP management,” Harwood said.
The dispute is a relatively rare one between Harwood and CMP. The public advocate is a longtime energy attorney who was an adviser to Gov. Janet Mills on that subject before she appointed him to his current position in early 2022. While Mills has criticized CMP at times, she backed its unpopular hydropower corridor and opposed a bid to take over CMP and Versant.
That prompted supporters of that effort, led by the political group Our Power, to take the issue to the ballot this year. The parents of CMP and Versant have spent heavily against Question 3. Harwood has not taken a position on the question, but he released a fact sheet on the initiative this week that pointed to unknowns around reliability, customer services and climate effects.
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