Con Edison Executives in Hot Seat at Hearing Over Summer Outages
September 04 2019 - 4:50PM
Dow Jones News
By Katie Honan
Consolidated Edison Inc. executives faced a barrage of questions
from New York city council members during a hearing Wednesday over
a string of summertime power outages that left thousands of
customers in the dark.
During the four-hour hearing, the executives defended the
utility's service while also vowing to improve its power grid to
avoid future blackouts.
In a July 13 outage, the west side of Manhattan lost electricity
for several hours, stranding people in elevators and subway
stations. Con Edison, which powers most of the city, attributed the
outage to a faulty cable. Days later, during a heat wave with
temperatures near 100 degrees, neighborhoods in southeast Brooklyn
also lost power as the company's grid hit record demand.
"The events in southeast Brooklyn and on the West Side of
Manhattan happened because -- despite our strategic, target
investments -- our system is not perfect," David DiSanti, a vice
president at Con Edison, said at the hearing.
Council Speaker Corey Johnson, who represents parts of Manhattan
that were without power, said during the hearing that the utility
failed its customers and didn't seem apologetic enough about the
outages. He asked Con Edison executives about their improvement
plans and an anticipated coming rate increase. The utility put in
for the proposed increase in January. If approved, the rate rise
would go into effect at the beginning of 2020.
"There seems to be a total mismatch potentially of the
perception of yourself and the perception the public has of you,"
Mr. Johnson, a Democrat, said.
The council speaker also grilled the utility for information on
which neighborhoods had the oldest infrastructure and how often it
tested the cables involved in running the backup system to its
power network, including the one in Manhattan that failed.
A Con Edison official later said that the utility was up-to-date
with inspections for the cable that failed.
The utility has plans to upgrade parts of its system, but the
outages this summer weren't the result of a failing or aging
infrastructure, the company's executives said at the hearing. The
company has spent more than $200 million on the grid in southeast
Brooklyn over the past decade and invested more than $1.5 billion
each year across the city since 2015, executives said.
The summer outages prompted Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de
Blasio, both Democrats, to each order investigations into the
utility. They also questioned whether the utility should be
replaced. Mr. de Blasio said he "can't trust" Con Edison.
Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, a Democrat who also attended
the hearing, said the company didn't communicate well during the
outages and was critical of the proposed rate increase.
"I think people have a right to ask, if we're paying more money,
what exactly are we getting," he said.
Write to Katie Honan at Katie.Honan@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
September 04, 2019 16:35 ET (20:35 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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