Faced with a dramatic spike in power outages, the Bay State’s major power companies are circling the wagons – with potentially dire consequences for homeowners and businesses alike.

The number of major power failures in Massachusetts has skyrocketed in recent years, capped by the week-long blackouts that followed Tropical Storm Irene last August and the Snowtober storm.

Meanwhile, the state’s three major utilities racked up a whopping $160 million-plus repair bill during last fall’s two big outages, costs the companies readily admit they plan to pass on to you and me.

Yet the response so far from the electric power industry – as well as from the state regulators who are supposed to be the watchdogs – is a mix of denial and delusion.

“Most people in Massachusetts will not remember a time when we had so many power outages,” said Deirdre Cummings, legislative director at consumer group MassPIRG. “Ratepayers should absolutely not have to pay for poor decisions or mismanagement by the utilities.”

The news that business and homeowners will be stuck with the bill for anywhere from $160 million to as much as $190 million was reported recently by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting (NECIR).

But the same week the NECIR story appeared, state regulators all but signed off on a merger between NStar, which accounted for roughly a third of last fall’s historic outage costs, and Northeast Utilities, which racked up more than $200 million of its own costs in Connecticut.

The headline-grabbing agreement was cast as a major coup for the state, complete with a deal to freeze rates for four years and provide a one-time, $21 million rebate.

The rate freezes and rebate are all well and good. But in the media coverage of the deal, barely a nod was given to the reliability issue – and what impact uniting two lumbering utilities might have on getting the lights back on after the next major storm.

It does seem a little bit of a shell game here. After all, the $160 million that ratepayers across the state will likely have to fork over to recompense NStar and the state’s other big utilities will certainly take a big bite out of those savings. (Which, after all, only apply to NStar customers anyway.)

Still, last fall’s historic storm costs may be prove to be just the tip of the iceberg. Homeowners and businesses across the state, especially in the energy intensive commercial real estate sector, should be even more concerned about what the future holds.

Dim Future

If the past few years are any indication, we could be in for a very rough – and dimly lit – ride ahead.

There have been a total of eight major grid meltdowns over the past five years, mainly after snow and ice storms, the NECIR story found, citing U.S. Department of Energy stats. That’s compared to just two serious outages from 2001 to 2006, federal stats show.

Once a rarity, major power outages appear to be fast becoming an annual occurrence. And the response of the state’s big power companies – “don’t blame us, and by the way, we’ll bill you later” – isn’t exactly a confidence builder.

Instead of confronting the problem head on, the state’s big utilities are instead offering up lame excuses about the weather and pushing back aggressively against common sense questions.

But upon even a cursory examination, the weather theory falls apart rather quickly.

Small, town-owned power companies scattered across the big utilities’ territories – in places like Wellesley, Braintree, Mansfield and Taunton, to name a few – managed to get their lights back in a day or two, and, in some cases, a few hours.

To believe last fall’s outages were all just a product of severe weather, then you have to envision an outlandish scenario where Irene carefully skirted municipal-owned utilities in Wellesley and Belmont to vent its wrath on towns like Natick and Lexington, both in NStar’s territory.

It boils down to a common sense issue – no one outside the corporate suites of the big power companies is buying this line of reasoning.

To their credit, state utility regulators along with Attorney General Martha Coakley have begun to look seriously at the reliability issue. There are two ongoing investigations right now, one by the DPU and one by Coakley’s office.

Yet with the green-energy obsessed Patrick Administration, it’s hard not to get the sense that relatively boring issue of electric grid reliability runs a poor second to pursuing glitzy green energy projects with a potential political payoff down the line.

“When I was governor of Massachusetts, I kept the lights on” – well that is not exactly campaign trail material, now is it?