New Mexico should keep control of energy future

There were, I believe, unsubstantiated claims in former Gov. Bill Richardson’s letter to the editor (“The right merger,” Nov 20). He claimed “The Iberdrola/Avangrid leadership team continues to provide energy solutions with unmatched world-class engineering for power generation, electrical transmission and advanced grid technology.”

“World class?” Not in Maine, where for the last three years, Avangrid’s Central Maine Power scored the lowest customer service satisfaction rating in the country on J.D. Power’s annual survey of utility customers. “World class?” CMP produced the second-most power outages annually of any utility company in the nation, according to the National Energy Information Agency.

Parent company Iberdrola is under investigation for corporate spying, bribery and forgery in Spain. And in Bolivia, the president nationalized Iberdrola’s operations because of inconsistent service, charging more for electricity in rural areas than in cities and ignoring repeated demands to address the deficiencies.

Our Public Regulation Commission’s chief hearing examiner, Ashley Schannauer, issued a recommendation that the proposed merger be rejected because the potential risks of outages, diminished service quality, corruption, subsidization of nonutility activities and reduction in local control significantly outweigh any promised benefits.

In an effort to save the merger, Avangrid announced acceptance of all the hearing examiner’s conditions but then filed exceptions to four fundamental ones, including reliability metrics and automatic penalties for reliability failures. Why would a corporation with “world-class engineering” expertise resist performance measures?

Richardson wrote “They have earned the respect for their accomplishments from leaders in the communities in which they operate and around the world.” Yet 59 percent of Maine voters rejected Avangrid’s plan to construct a power line from Quebec through Maine to Massachusetts to sell Canadian hydro-electric energy at no benefit to Maine customers but with great profit to Avangrid. Avangrid ignored the vote and continued bulldozing the Maine forest.

Avangrid/Iberdrola/PNM have proved to be corrupt and unreliable. Why would New Mexico hand over our energy future to this partnership? Learn more at RetakeOurDemocracy.org/Avangrid and contact your commissioner to urge him or her to vote no on this merger.