Big utility again fails customers in new San Onofre debacle

Any California consumers who still believed this state’s big privately-owned utility companies are either willing or able to protect the interests of their many millions of customers must surely be disabused of that notion today.

Yes, companies like Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Gas, San Diego Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison are talking a good customer service game lately, repeatedly advertising efforts to make pipelines and other features of their vast systems safer, while also selling energy for less than in some earlier times.

But the outcome of an arbitration case that Edison touted for years as a huge coming benefit for customers demonstrates that talk is cheap.

Edison long cited the case as a coming bonanza for its ratepayers, noting it had demanded $7.6 billion from Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries as a penalty for furnishing flawed steam generators that wrecked the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, finally shut down in 2012.

Customers were ticketed to get half Edison’s winnings under terms of a socalled “settlement” reached between the company, the state Public Utilities Commission and two purported consumer groups in 2014, an agreement that saw consumers assessed 70 percent of San Onofre’s $4.7 billion in closure costs.

Oops. The decision by an arbitration panel of private judges from the International Chamber of Commerce arrived this spring: Instead of $7.6 billion, Edison will only get $125 million, or about 3.3 percent of what it has hyped for years. Customers will get half ThomasD. Eliaswrites onCalifornia politicsand otherissues.