Pepco is getting a nod from local officials for its $115 million plan to improve reliability, but lawmakers don’t trust the power company to succeed without penalties.
Pepco’s plan would increase its spending by more than 81 percent to bury power lines and trim more trees and vegetation around aboveground lines.
“It’s a good plan, but frankly, they should have been doing it all along,” said Montgomery County Council President Nancy Floreen, D-at large — one of Pepco’s most vocal critics. “Now we just need to make sure they follow the plan.”
The utility company announced the proposal two days after the Maryland Public Service Commission spent roughly seven hours grilling Pepco executives about the company’s reliability — which has been the worst in the state for the last five years. Commissioners say they plan to ramp up regulations against Pepco following an exhaustive investigation into its service delivery.
But that’s not enough for Del. Brian J. Feldman, D-Bethesda.
Feldman has drafted legislation that would require the PSC to establish reliability standards for all Maryland utilities by 2012. If the utilities fail to meet those standards, they would be penalized, Feldman told The Washington Examiner.
“The Public Service has, on its own, the authority to do some of these things the bill calls for,” Feldman said. “But the General Assembly doesn’t need to rely exclusively on the Public Service Commission here. The commissioners are regulators. They are not elected officials. We need to remain proactive.”
The PSC began investigating Pepco last week following three thunderstorms that knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of Pepco customers for as long as five days. A single storm on July 25 left more than 240,000 of Pepco’s 302,000 Montgomery customers in the dark.
Pepco’s new spending proposal — which utility executives said was drafted last month — would add $115 million to the company’s $141.5 million plan to improve reliability.
About $75 million would go toward burying power lines in areas particularly sensitive to outages, and $15 million would go toward trimming trees and other vegetation around aboveground power lines. Pepco attributes 90 percent of its outages to fallen trees.
However, the utility company has traditionally allocated 15 percent of its budget to vegetation maintenance.
The PSC is holding another hearing on Pepco’s reliability Monday night in Rockville.
