Nearly three months after township residents spent a long two weeks without electricity due to Hurricane Sandy, it’s becoming more and more apparent to local officials that for better or worse — and despite their best efforts — they are going to be stuck with Jersey Central Power & Light (JCP&L).
It wasn’t just the extended outages from the scores of felled trees that frustrated officials, said Pequannock Mayor Rich Phelan, it was the lack of communication about where restoration efforts were that led to the town’s disgust with its electrical provider.
As a result, a number of local towns, including Pequannock, made informal inquiries as to what it would take to switch utilities, but it appears the game of musical chairs will end before it begins because of what Phelan called the "mind-boggling" difficulties associated with it.
It was during a Jan. 3 meeting with state Board of Public Utilities (BPU) President Bob Hanna, Phelan said, that he was told that the town itself would have to buy all of the electrical infrastructure — including the poles, substations, and wires — the cost for which could run into the tens of millions of dollars.
Following that, the town would have to petition the BPU to release it from the franchise agreement that JCP&L has on this piece of the state, and BPU spokesman Greg Reinert said that the onus would be on Pequannock to prove that JCP&L "failed to provide safe, adequate, and proper service" as required under the law.
Even if the board agreed, the town would have to find another utility —such as Public Service Energy & Gas (PSE&G) or Butler Electric — to take over the maintenance of the grid and provide power. However, because not all utilities use the same hardware, a successful transition could require millions of dollars in changes to electrical wires, transformers, and the like.
All in all, the mayor said, the idea has proven an "unrealistic" answer for a town that is still more habitually concerned with the Pompton River’s rising waters than the failings of an aging electrical grid.
"To put the time and money…into trying to do that…might be a big mistake in my eyes," he said. "We’re a small town. We watch our nickels and dimes, and it’s not something that we feel justified chasing. We’ve got a bigger problem, and it’s called flooding."
However, residents still truly spiteful toward JCP&L could always purchase power from one of the plethora of third-party sellers who routinely call their homes during dinnertime, and the town itself could even organize a mass departure from JCP&L by signing up residents and businesses through a process known as "municipal aggregation," Reinert said.
But when the grid goes down, it would still be JCP&L working on the lines, and the switch wouldn't put a dent in the company’s pocket because, according to Reinert, utilities don’t make money off of selling electricity, but off the rate of return on the infrastructure they've built. In other words, the charge to recoup the cost of building the grid is paid regardless of who provides the power.
"You get a bill from (the utility) and it breaks it down: Here’s the cost of the electricity, and here’s the cost of bringing it to you," he said. "And you pay the bill, and the (utility) reimburses the third-party supplier."
Customers’ complaints have been heard ‘loud and clear’
JCP&L has heard the complaints about what many say was an inadequate response to Sandy "loud and clear," said spokesman Ron Morano, especially in regards to the lack of communication between the utility and the municipalities it serves.
In response, the company has developed a series of "new operational practices" designed to provide information to municipal officials about restoration efforts. This, he said, will include things like locating JCP&L liaisons in field offices, hosting teleconference briefings about localized restoration work, deploying "additional company personnel" to work with municipal representatives, and training county and municipal first responders on electrical safety.
The utility would also provide municipalities with maps showing electrical circuit routes in their communities, and is said to be developing mobile apps to help customers report outages and access their account information.
"We communicated very well throughout the storm, but a lack of specific levels of information was the biggest (complaint)," he said. "That’s the area that we’re going to focus on going forward."
The BPU appears to be nudging all electric distribution companies down a similar path, and at its Jan. 23 meeting, mandated that all utilities enact 103 specific actions to "improve their preparedness and responses" to major storms.
According to a press release from the BPU, many of the actions must be done by June 1 (the official start of the 2013 hurricane season) and nearly all must be completed by September.
The list, among other things, includes demands that the companies make a "global estimated time of restoration" available within 24 hours of a major outage, and requires daily updates for municipal officials concerning both the number of customers that remain without power and how many will be restored each day.
The utilities will have to maintain separate Web pages for each municipality giving a "detailed description" of the electrical grid (including explanations of circuits and substations), and links to information about the restoration process and procedures.
The implementation of the measures, said Reinert, as well as the development of more proactive policies regarding things like vegetation management, represents "another step in the process" toward remedying what went wrong after Sandy.
In Pequannock, though, the proposals were met with sighs and eye rolls; Phelan said it’s deeds, not words, that will make the difference. Saying he doesn’t believe anything will come of this may be an understatement.
"It’s the same story over and over again, and personally I don’t see how it’s going to change much unless they put people on the ground prior to these storms," he said. "I hate to say this, but talk is cheap. (JCP&L) needs to do something, and I don’t think they’re going to."
He was less than enthused about more Web page diagrams that often break down outages by substations instead of political boundaries — leading to inaccuracies in estimating the number of affected residents in a given town — and said that making one field representative beholden to only one town might be a way to fix the communication breakdowns.
"I don’t think that having a Web page that tells me Pequannock has 5,000 residents out is really doing any good because I know it’s inaccurate," he said. "I want a guy in my town that I can talk to… Information is key, because when residents are asking us, we need to be able to tell them something."
Township Manager Dave Hollberg agreed, and said that the daily phone calls about outage numbers and restoration plans were "useless" because the utility didn’t restore people when it said it was going to. As a result, municipal officials often disregarded the reports as soon as they came in.
A local supervisor, though, would have value, especially if that person was given the power to fix small issues if possible, he said.
"It seems like there was a lot of down-time, and a lot of wasted time, in how they made their determinations about how things were to be repaired," he said. "If they gave a little bit of that authority to do the stupid little stuff (to a local contact), I think they’d accomplish a lot more."
But in the end, municipalities — especially small ones like Pequannock — don’t hold the cards, and can do almost nothing if the utility were to fail to perform once again.
"There’s certain things that are within our control, and there’s things that are not within our control," said Phelan. "And if JCP&L does not work with the Township of Pequannock, it’s not like Pequannock can say, ‘Straighten up your act or we’re going to fire you.’"
Instead, officials are left hoping, as Phelan does, that an event like Sandy simply never happens again. Because in the end, it’s all they can do.
Email: janoski@northjersey.com
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