NPU leaders explain storm response to lawmakers

Visit came among ongoing, widespread criticism of Eversource

Norwich — Viewing municipal utilities as a “gold standard” and hoping they can be used as a “measuring stick” for storm response, Rep. Joe Courtney, D-2nd District, joined state legislators at Norwich Public Utilities on Tuesday to hear about NPU’s storm response.

The visit came among ongoing and widespread criticism of Eversource

for its response to Tropical Storm Isaias, and a day after Energy and Technology Committee leaders unveiled bipartisan regulatory legislation.

NPU General Manager Chris LaRose and spokesperson Chris Riley hosted Courtney, Energy and Technology Committee Chairman state Sen. Norm Needleman, D-Essex; and state Sen. Cathy Osten, D-Sprague, for a discussion in NPU’s emergency operations center.

According to NPU, 35% of customers lost power due to Isaias, but of those 7,500 customers, 99% had

power restored in two days and 100% in three days.

“When the storm came, I don’t think anybody honestly predicted the damage that was going to happen,” LaRose said, but noted that NPU prepared for a Category 3 hurricane.

In the response, he said the utility’s priorities were hospitals, then business centers, then places with the most customers per outage. But he also said NPU doesn’t wait until the end to deal with outages that affect only one or two households.

NPU has 146 employees, and all the general managers are unionized. That’s about the same number of workers NPU had in 2011, when Connecticut saw massive power outages from both Hurricane Irene and the October snowstorm.

LaRose said it takes about 10 years for someone to become a skilled lineman, and the company pre-fills jobs before they’re vacant if they know a lineman is approaching retirement age.

He said there’s no program in the state technical school system specifically for linemen but NPU looks for people who have a “high school education with a strong intellectual background” and gets some people who come in with an electrician’s license.

NPU has 11 linemen responsible for power restoration, and after power was restored for all NPU customers following Isaias, eight worked from the Saturday to the Wednesday after the storm providing mutual aid to Eversource.

They helped people in Lyme, Old Lyme, East Lyme and Waterford, for example.

NPU rates are about 24% less than those of Eversource but it varies throughout the year, La Rose said. NPU is holding a public hearing next week on rates and looking to put out a three-year rate schedule.

The paradox is that some want to see legislation enabling municipal utilities like NPU and Groton Utilities to expand their coverage area because of their storm response, but part of the strong storm response comes from having a small territory.

“We do very well in a storm response because we have a small and nimble area,” Riley said.

Similarly, in response to a question from Osten about moving into other communities, LaRose later said that “if you get large, you have some of the issues of being as quick and as nimble.”

Despite Eversource being much larger, both Courtney and Osten expressed that they thought it was fair to make a comparison with NPU’s performance.

“To me, we’re talking about the same weather event, we’re talking about the same state and in some cases even the same county or region,” Courtney said. Comparing Norwich to Sprague, Osten added, “When you go 10 miles down the road and it takes an additional five days to get power back, that doesn’t make a whole boatload of sense.”