Forget all the breathless coverage about the “unprecedented” and “record” fines the big power companies will have to pay for leaving us all in dark during 2011’s Tropical Storm Irene and a pre-Halloween blizzard.

Here’s the deal: Homeowners and businesses across the Bay State will still have to cough up as much as $135 million to cover the cost of those disastrous 2011 outages, even after the $24.8 million in fines just announced by the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities is accounted for.

Worse still, this looming bill has gone unacknowledged by state regulators and unreported in all the rather superficial media coverage of what should be a major consumer issue.

And this is just the cost of putting wires back up and the lights back on – it does not even account for the sweeping and costly disruption to business and everyday life across the state the outages caused.

Running The Numbers

To be clear, I am no industry expert. But I just happened to dig into the cost of 2011 outages  – and who will ultimately pay for them – for a pair of stories I did last winter and spring for the New England Center for Investigative Reporting.
The state’s three major power companies, NStar, National Grid and Western Massachusetts Electric, acknowledged potential storm costs of as much as $160 million. And all three acknowledged they expected to bring those bills in future years to the state Department of Public Utilities, to be “recovered” in the rates they charge customers.

For their part, state utility regulators have done their best to play dumb on this issue, grudgingly acknowledging it is an issue at all and insisting that costs will be reviewed when the time comes at some future, undetermined regulatory hearing.

Subtract the $24.8 million in fines – okay, it’s at least something – and now we are left with $135 million.
That doesn’t even include the costs businesses – from tech companies to manufacturers to restaurants – were forced to eat, from lost productivity and sales to spoiled food.

And what about homeowners who were forced to flee to hotels and eat out to escape the cold and dark?

We are easily talking tens of millions more that are a total loss, with no chance, given current trends, of any of us seeing that money again.

Dodging Responsibility

In fact, our big power companies, who enjoy a state-sanctioned monopoly, contend for the most part they did just fine during Tropical Storm Irene and the freak pre-Halloween snow storm.

They would rather blame most of the problems we saw during the catastrophic fall of 2011 on the weather. That’s a natural line of defense for the power company fat cats – and one that our state regulators, theoretically minding the shop and protecting consumers – should have challenged aggressively. Instead, after months of public hearings and countless hours sifting through written testimony, the Department of Public Utilities (DPU) decided the problem was a big, old failure to communicate with customers and local police and fire officials.

National Grid did get a scolding for a “system failure,” including not bringing in enough power crews from other states to help out.

But Ann Berwick, the chairwoman of the DPU, in a statement, basically asserts her belief that mass power outages are inevitable, whatever the power companies do to prepare.

“The DPU understands that there will be many thousands of outages in bad storms like Tropical Storm Irene and the October snowstorm,” Berwick said. “These will not be the last severe storms we see, and the public cannot expect that the utilities can prevent outages in events of this magnitude.”

Ann, thanks for the heads up. We should all try to be a little less demanding the next time the lights go out for a week.

Seriously though, this flies in the face of testimony and evidence brought to the attention of our state’s utility regulators during their months-long review.

Even as the major power companies took a week or more to restore power that fall, dozens of small-municipally owned power companies, from Taunton to Concord, managed to get their lights back on in a matter of hours to a day or two at the most.
These “munis,” as they are called, employ proportionately more linemen than their lumbering big utility counterparts. Moreover, they also have a track record of embracing more storm resistant equipment, from tougher lines to, in some cases, putting wires underground.

This suggests that the mass outages we saw in the fall of 2011 – and even the two or three days of darkness that followed Sandy – were anything but inevitable, but rather the product of how the big power companies have chosen to do business.
Amazingly, the questions raised by the superior performance of the publicly owned city and town power companies that dot Massachusetts was not deemed worthy of exploration in the voluminous report our state utility regulators released last week.
Seems like a gross violation of common sense, but really, I am the one who should know better at this point.

After all, here in Massachusetts, this is just standard operating procedure.

Scott Van Voorhis can be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.