Dive Brief:
- California Assemblyman Anthony Rendon (D-Lakewood) asked the California Public Utilities Commission to reopen the legal settlement that required Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric, owners of the now-shuttered San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS), to pay $1.4 billion for its closure. SDG&E customers were charged $3.3 billion.
- Rendon, chair of the powerful Utilities and Commerce Committee, asked CPUC President Michael Picker to force the utilities to turn over emails relevant to the SONGS closure, including those pertaining to the unsuccessful replacement of defective steam generators that caused the 2,200+ MW facility to be taken permanently offline.
- The controversial settlement, reached through private 2014 talks between SCE, SDG&E, two ratepayer groups and environmentalists, became more questionable when it was revealed that former SCE VP Stephen Picket negotiated the deal’s outlines in secret with then CPUC President Michael Peevey.
Dive Insight:
An outline of the settlement written on stationery of the hotel where the unethical Peevey-Picket meeting took place was seized during a search of Peevey's home.
SCE admitted to the private meeting 686 days after it took place. Communications between utilities and regulators about ongoing matters outside the formal CPUC proceeding must be reported to all parties involved within three days.
The two-reactor nuclear facility, 78 percent owned and entirely operated by SCE, went on-line in 1983-1984 and was taken offline in January 2012 after detection of radioactive steam leaks.
The leaks were determined to be from prematurely-worn steam generator tubes that had been part of renovations done by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries on the 1,172-megawatt SONGS Unit Two in January 2010 and the 1,178-megawatt Unit Three in January 2011 (SONGS Unit One, started up in January 1968, was decommissioned in 1992 due to wear). Units Two and Three never came back on-line.
