Official: SDG&E Customers Shouldn’t Pay for San Onofre During Shutdown

Customers of San Diego Gas & Electric shouldn’t have to pay for continued expenses incurred by the beleaguered , says one high-ranking official at the California Public Utilities Commission.

Joseph P. Como, head of the PUC’s Division of Ratepayer Advocates, sent a letter to the commissioners this week stating they should “remove [San Onofre] from Southern California Edison’s ... and San Diego Gas & Electric’s... rate base now instead of waiting several more months and allowing hundreds of millions of dollars in needless costs to be borne by customers.”

The Orange County Register on Tuesday reported: 

“Edison, the plant's operator, is charging ratepayers about $54 million per month for a nonproducing plant, the letter said. Edison holds 78 percent of the plant's ownership, SDG&E owns 20 percent, and Riverside 1.8 percent, the CPUC said.”

An investigation into whether it’s worth it to the ratepayers to keep the plant open would automatically trigger after nine months of nonoperation. That would be in November for Unit 3 and December for Unit 2.

But that section of the code “is not intended to be a free pass for utilities to earn a return on nonfunctioning hardware for nine months,” Como wrote. “The commission has a responsibility to act sooner when the facts before it demonstrate that a major part of a jurisdictional utility’s plant is out of service.”

The commission has twice postponed voting on whether to start such an early investigation.

The San Onofre plant . The leak, though minor itself, revealed widespread wear in crucial heat exchanger tubes unprecedented in the industry.

The outage cost Southern California Edison

Edison officials want to restart Unit 2, were there were fewer worn-out tubes, at partial strength for a shorter-than-normal operating period.

Unit 3, were there was the most severe damage, has engineers scratching their heads about how to fix the problems.

Como in his letter referred to a 1982 decision against the nuclear plant operators to support his point.

“The commission followed its staff recommendation that SONGS 2 [Unit 2] should not be included in [the] rate base until it was in commercial operation,” Como writes. “The commission did not think it reasonable for ratepayers to bear the full cost of the plant without receiving commensurate benefits of generation and reliable service.”

Como says the California Supreme Court also upheld the part of the code that states the utility must be functioning to be included in the rate base, stating that a plant in question must be “used and useful.”

“It seems very obviously that a fundamental prerequisite for a power generator to be considered “used and useful” is that it actually be generating power,” Como writes. “SONGS does not meet this test.”

Southern California Edison officials said in a statement that they are aware of the letter and want to work with the commission.

“We are currently focused on our planning for the repairs of Unit 2, which we will submit to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as soon as plans are complete,” said San Onofre Chief Nuclear Officer Pete Dietrich in the Edison release. “We recognize that the extended outage has been a challenge for customers, and we will work with the commission to meet the regulatory framework as designed.”

See San Clemente Patch topic page for almost 400 news stories chronicling the last few years in the history of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.