The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Regulatory ruling says Millstone ‘at risk’ of closing
A tentative ruling by state utility regulators may boost efforts by the owner of the Millstone Nuclear Power Plant to have the electricity it produces considered in the ‘zero carbon’ auction that the state’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection conducts to procure power.
Commissioners with Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority ruled that the Waterfordbased power plant “is at risk of retirement.” Dominion Energy, the Virginiabased company that owns Millstone, has claimed for several years that economic conditions in the nation’s energy markets are making it difficult for the utility to keep operating the plant if it’s it not allowed to compete for lucrative long-term contracts that are awarded to the winners of the zerocarbon auction.
“This interim decision does not reach the issue of whether a purchase power agreement with Millstone should be selected by DEEP or approved,” the tentative ruling says in part. “But (it) addresses solely the basis on which such a bid may be evaluated.”
Dominion officials release a statement Friday following PURA’s ruling say they are pleased with the decision made by regulators.
“They have been given access to our confidential information, have done their own analysis, and reached their own conclusion, Millstone is at risk,” the statement says in part. “We are now focused on the zero carbon procurement at the Department of Energy & Environmental Protection. We made numerous offers that would both ensure Millstone’s continued operations and provide benefits to Connecticut ratepayers ranging from the hundreds of millions of dollars to billions of dollars.” DEEP officials are expected to announce the winners of the zero carbon auction by the end of the year. PURA’s determination that Millstone is at risk of closing will be a factor that DEEP officials will take into account as they try to determine the winners of the auction from a field of dozens of renewable energy sources that submitted proposals earlier this year.
PURA’s ruling comes almost 16 months after Gov. Dannel P. Malloy issued an executive order requiring regulators and DEEP officials to conduct a detailed assessment of the current and future viability of Millstone. And it follows a May PURA filing by Dominion seeking to have Millstone declared as “an existing resource confirmed at risk.”
Prior to that filing, Dominion officials had been reluctant to let state officials see the financial records of the power plant. But in PURA’s tentative decision, commissioners write the company “sufficiently disclosed its financial data in a manner that facilitated the authority's review of Millstone's actual financial circumstances in recent years, as well as the company's projections on its financial condition going forward.”
Parts of the 26-page ruling are redacted because the company and regulators consider some of the company’s financial data to be sensitive.
Joel Gordes, a West Hartford-based energy industry consultant, said PURA’s commissioners erred in their draft ruling.
“To treat nuclear power as it were a renewable resource is completely inappropriate,” Gordes said. “Real renewable resources don’t produce a deadly byproduct that has to be guarded for an eternity.”