Consumers Council of Missouri

If you were among the hundreds of thousands without power as a result of severe storms last year, it is good news to hear that AmerenUE is planning to upgrade its system and improve its tree trimming program.  Will it be enough, or once again will more than 600,000 customers face extended outages if the region is hit with severe storms in the future?  Only time will tell.

The Consumers Council is a bit skeptical, and it is continuing to ask the MO Public Service Commision for rules requiring AmerenUE to give rebates (or credits) of $25 a day for outages lasting longer than 48 hours.  We encourage you to support this plan with a message to the PSC.  The Chairman is Jeff Davis, and the e-mail address is www.psc.mo.gov or Box 360, Jefferson City, MO 65102.  See the following St. Louis Post Dispatch article for detailed plans of the upgrades.

 The Balm before the Storm

Author: Jeffrey Tomich

A year after thunderstorms packing hurricane force winds ripped through the area leaving 600,000 AmerenUE customers in the dark, the utility says it will invest hundreds of millions of dollars to fortify the power grid and make it less prone to widespread outages. Much of the spending – $100 million a year for three years – will be used to bury miles of overhead power lines, especially those most susceptible to falling trees and limbs. An additional $28 million a year over the same period will go for more inspections and repairs to fix problems with poles and hardware before they fail. St. Louis-based Ameren, which has 1.2 million Missouri customers, will announce the plans this morning as part of a three-year, $1 billion initiative called Project Power On. The project includes more funding for tree trimming and $500 million to install pollution controls at the 40-year-old Sioux power plant in St. Charles County. Ameren doesn’t have any plans to roll out a similar reliability project at its three utilities in Illinois, which are grappling with the response by customers and legislators to a steep jump in electricity prices after rate caps expired at the end of last year. Utility infrastructure projects rarely generate a public relations blitz. But few utilities have faced the fierce public backlash that Ameren did after three widespread power outages over a six-month period last year. And executives said they want customers to know they’re listening. “We have always made investments, we just didn’t talk about it,” Thomas R. Voss, AmerenUE’s chief executive, said in an interview at the company’s Chouteau Avenue headquarters. “We realized that was a mistake.” But AmerenUE officials insist that the project to “harden” its electric delivery system, and make it less prone to storms, isn’t an admission of any past failures. “This isn’t an issue of trying to improve something that was broken,” said Voss, who was named AmerenUE’s CEO last year. “This is trying to make it better than it was, especially for severe weather. This is all about going a step further.” Project Power On was conceived in January. Ameren spent six months and met with more than 150 local officials and neighborhood groups to identify and prioritize individual projects, and determine how much to spend on each, said Richard J. Mark, AmerenUE’s senior vice president of energy delivery. “It surprised all of us the amount of analysis it took to look at each of the 62 counties we serve and where the projects would be and determine manpower,” he said. At a cost of $1 million a mile, the $300 million set aside to bury some overhead power lines will cover only a tiny fraction of the utility’s 27,000 miles of existing overhead electric wire. Ameren also is encouraging cities to require underground utilities in new subdivisions. “We’re not on a path to put everything on our system underground,” Voss said. “It’s just to shore it up in areas where we think the system is weak. We think this will be an answer for what have been troublesome areas.” The first project, replacing 2,000 feet of overhead line with 2,800 feet of underground wire in the heavily wooded Talisman Way subdivision in north St. Louis County, is almost complete. A second is in the planning stages, Ameren spokesman Tim Fox said. The subdivision, made up of about two dozen homes, has been plagued by power surges and failures for more than two years, said Lorrie Backowski, a neighborhood association trustee who spent nine days without electricity after the storms last summer and also lost power in the December ice storm. “I’ve lived in the subdivision about 13 years, and I’ve probably made three or four food claims against my insurance for food spoilage,” she said. It required persistence to get Ameren’s attention, but Backowski said she is encouraged by efforts to permanently put an end to flickering lights, summer afternoons without air conditioning and spoiled food. Besides burying more lines, Ameren is beefing up inspections of infrastructure by establishing a “foot patrol” of circuit inspectors who will walk neighborhoods in search of problems. They’ll also test thermal imaging devices used on larger power lines to look for hot spots where corrosion or a loose connection could cause a power failure. The company says poles will be tested and replaced more frequently. The annual tree trimming budget has been boosted 40 percent to $45 million, as approved by Missouri regulators. And AmerenUE is voluntarily adopting the 2007 National Electric Safety Code for larger subtransmission lines even though it’s not required to do so. The reliability projects won’t prevent storm-related outages altogether but should help minimize damage, Voss said. And when outages do occur, customers will be able to check online whether their power has been restored with just a phone number, rather than being required to register with the website and establish a user name and password. The utility also established a team dedicated to more accurate restoration times during a major outage. “That’s something that no one’s been able to figure out at any utility anywhere,” Voss said. “But we’re going to make a better effort updating those.” Next week marks the anniversary of two severe thunderstorms that roared through the bistate region last July and left 1 million customers without power, some for more than a week. Hundreds of thousands of customers lost power in December and January after crippling ice storms coated trees and limbs, causing them to snap and topple power lines. The widespread outages prompted regulators in Missouri and Illinois to investigate Ameren’s preparation and response to the storms. The Missouri Public Service Commission has written new rules aimed at beefing up tree trimming requirements and implementing new standards for power line inspections across the state. The commission will conduct a public hearing on the rules next month in Jefferson City. A separate rule that would establish new reliability standards is still being discussed. Missouri’s top utility regulator, PSC Chairman Jeff Davis, said he is encouraged by some steps Ameren has taken over the past year and said two of the new rules could be in place by year’s end. “We need to see some results before we’re really content with how things are going,” Davis said. “It’s going to take a little time, but I think they’ve gotten started on it. We just need to keep pushing and making sure that they’re following through.” Ameren has questioned the need for reliability rules, which would require tens of millions of dollars in equipment to record momentary power blips. “There’s an awful lot of money needed for equipment to measure reliability and not actually fixing reliability, and we think that’s a mistake,” Voss said. The Consumers Council of Missouri is pushing regulators to establish what it considers an important provision in the rules being considered – $25 credits for customers who are without power for more than two days.”We’d certainly be unhappy if the commission doesn’t propose any type of customer credit,” said John Coffman, the group’s interim president. “I think most people are willing to persevere, but after 48 hours I think that goes beyond what customers expect.”

Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch