New York – Consolidated Edison will give up $9 million in profits this year for failing to meet state-mandated electricity reliability standards.
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The New York Public Service Commission has voted unanimously to order the utility to return the money to its customers.
The repayment involves an outage that affected about 137,000 customers on Manhattan’s Upper East side and in the west Bronx for about 48 minutes in June 2007.
It was approved by the PSC board today after a briefing on electrical reliability at Con Edison and National Grid, which is also facing customer givebacks totaling millions of dollars.
When outages exceed certain levels, utilities have to set aside money that otherwise would have gone to their shareholders and return it to affected customers.
Con Ed is one of the biggest crooks out there. Never taking responsibility for their mistakes. All they’re interested in is constantly raising rates. It’s about time someone stood up to these thugs.
I know someone in Brooklyn that has a Ice cream store and when a Con Ed transformer blew leaving no power to the area for over 10 hours. He sustained quiet a bit of damage to spoilage of products etc. but yet they denied his claim due to some rule that they passed themselves that the outage has be at least I think either 12 or 24 hours.
And when the outage surpasses the time limit they themselves imposed they find a way to lay the blame on someone else (remember that huge blackout 5 years ago? No one was reimbursed).
I have no doubt we’ll be seeing huge rate increases in the near future — ostensibly because of usage but in reality because they’ll want to find someone else to pay for the $9 million repayment.