Subscriber Benefit
As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe Now
State and not-for-profit utility consumer advocates have asked state regulators to investigate AES Indiana after a recent storm left some customers without power for nearly a week. The utility serves more than 500,000 customers, primarily in the Indianapolis area.
The Indiana Office of Utility Consumer Counselor, or OUCC, and Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana filed the petition with the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission on Tuesday. The request asks the powerful regulating agency to look into AES Indiana’s “practices and procedures for storm outage restoration,” and to see what caused the power losses and what complicated repairs.
A line of thunderstorms from Iowa on June 29 turned into a derecho in Indiana, according to the National Weather Service. That evening, AES Indiana told the IURC that power outages had affected more than 70,000 customers, the petition says.
By the next afternoon, the AES Indiana reported the outages had affected about 80,000 customers, and nearly 40,000 were still without electricity at the time of the report. The utility said it had hundreds of employees working to restore power.
Still, about 21,000 customers remained without power on July 1, followed by 7,000 on July 2 and 3,000 on July 3. AES Indiana said it had restored electricity to all of its customers by the evening of July 4 — but the petition notes some customers wrote on Twitter that they still didn’t have power.
“We understand that the June 29 storms were especially intense, and that additional storms occurred in the following days,” Indiana Utility Consumer Counselor Bill Fine said in a joint news release Wednesday. “However, we need to gather the facts regarding the outages, especially the factors causing certain customers to be without electricity for more than five days.”
He said customers should be able to have confidence in resilient utility service, adding, “We trust that a commission investigation will identify any steps needed to improve service quality in the future.”
Coalition Executive Director Kerwin Olson said he wanted to identify the “root causes” for the lengthy outages, storm aside, to boost reliability.
“Hoosier ratepayers deserve a complete and thorough investigation,” Olson said.
Meanwhile, AES Indiana recently asked regulators to let it raise base rates for the first time in five years. The utility’s requested hike would add about $17 to the average customer’s monthly bill.
Please enable JavaScript to view this content.
The storms were not “especially intense” and AES is abysmal. 3rd world abysmal. This is what happens when shareholder value is prioritized and utility companies, like airlines, should have to compensate customers for protracted outages.