Don't relax electricity reliability standards

Leave it to FirstEnergy to bring Democratic and Republican state lawmakers together in common cause. A bipartisan group of lawmakers on the Ohio House Energy Committee has rightly come out against the utility's request that it be allowed to lower its reliability standards for power outages affecting three of its subsidiaries, Ohio Edison, Toledo Edison and the Illuminating Co. Specifically, the company has asked the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio to allow it to allow it to change two metrics, a FirstEnergy spokeswoman told WKYC News. The first is the system average interruption frequency index, or SAIFI, which is the average number of interruptions per customer per year. The other is the customer average interruption duration index, or CAIDI, which is the average time it takes to restore power. Most impacted would be Illuminating Co. customers, who would see the CAIDI rise from 135 minutes to 150.49 minutes, according to FirstEnergy's filing with PUCO. The SAIFI would remain unchanged for those customers at 1.13 outages. Toledo Edison customers would see their CAIDI rise from 108.8 minutes to 120.53 minutes and the SAIFI rise from 0.76 outages to 0.81 outages. Ohio Edison customers — 124,695 of them are in Lorain County, according to FirstEnergy's website — would see their CAIDI rise from 114.37 minutes to 117.88 minutes. Their SAIFI would rise from 1 outage to 1.05 outages. All of which means that on average customers could expect more outages that would take more time to repair. Naturally, FirstEnergy has an explanation for why lower standards are needed: The weather has gotten worse in the past five years. "While major storms are excluded from the calculation, we've experienced many smaller, but damaging weather events," FirstEnergy said in a statement to WKYC. "Increased rainfall and more trees falling from outside the utility right‑of‑way have also put added strain on our equipment. According to the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Ohio averaged 2.3 severe weather events per year from 1980–2024, but that number jumped to 7.2 per year from 2020–2024, an indication of how much weather patterns have changed recently." Even without that data, most folks would likely agree, even if only anecdotally, that extreme weather events have become more common. The solution to that problem, though, shouldn't be to lower the standards, but to harden the grid. The 19 lawmakers, Democrats and Republicans, came to a similar conclusion in their letter, dated Jan. 14. "We recognize that Ohio's electric grid faces real challenges, including aging infrastructure and increasingly severe weather," they wrote. "However, the appropriate response to these challenges is targeted investment, prudent planning, and accountability for performance, not regulatory retreat. Weakening reliability standards shifts the burden of those challenges away from the utility and onto families, workers, and small businesses who bear the real costs of outages through lost income, spoiled food, business disruption, and risks to health and safety." They also pointed out that ratepayers have already paid FirstEnergy "billions of dollars in transmission, distribution, and grid modernization charges over the last two decades." FirstEnergy insisted it planned to spend more than $3 billion on upgrades over the next three years. (A key question for PUCO is whether that planned work would allow FirstEnergy to meet current reliability standards?) It sure seems it should have made that investment sooner. Unfortunately, the company had other priorities, including passage of House Bill 6 in 2019, a law that required ratepayers to bail out two nuclear power plants that one of the company's then-subsidiaries owned, along with two coal-fired power plants, one of which was in Indiana. After HB 6 passed, it emerged that FirstEnergy had paid roughly $60 million in bribes to increase the bill's chances of passage. Among those charged in the scandal was former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder, a Glenford Republican who was convicted of federal public-corruption charges and is now serving a 20-year prison sentence. The trial of two former top FirstEnergy executives, including ex-CEO Chuck Jones, on state corruption charges kicked off Tuesday in Summit County Common Pleas Court. (Ironically, the trial was supposed to start Monday but was delayed a day because of the snowstorm that hammered much of the nation over the weekend.) The fallout from the HB 6 scandal has been expensive for the company. Just this month it reached a roughly $280 million settlement, including restitution to customers, to end PUCO's HB 6 probe. That's on top of nearly $254 million the company had already paid to resolve various other HB 6-related legal issues, the largest of which was $230 million it paid as part of a federal deferred prosecution agreement. Combined, that's a significant amount of money the company could have spent on upgrading the grid, even if it doesn't add up to the $3 billion FirstEnergy has promised to spend between now and 2029. FirstEnergy is right to invest in its infrastructure, but it should be held to the reliability standards already in place while those improvements are being made. The company's customers shouldn't have to sit in the dark longer because it didn't act sooner.