Open letter to my state legislators, re: PSE & the storm

In the wake of the cyclone last week I wrote a letter to my legislators, following the shameful performance of PSE’s grid in the wake of the storm. Four days after, I met with friends who live in Bellevue for lunch, and they were still without power! While I’m aware that there are neighborhoods of Seattle that have been slowly recovering power, by the time I’m writing this blog post (that is, Sunday, the 24th of November) Seattle has nine outages affecting 11 total customers. PSE, meanwhile, has 16,738 affected customers, and SnoPUD has 2,112. I wouldn’t be surprised if very remote areas take significant time to recover, in both PSE’s and SnoPUD’s territory—but the fact that PSE has consistently been behind in every metric of recovery even by any reasonable measure of scale applied cannot be ignored.

The truly exceptional part of this is, a week before Thanksgiving, some five hundred thousand odd customers had to throw out the contents of their fridges! How much additional downstream waste did this failure create, anyways?

Briefly, I believe that PSE has shirked their basic responsibilities as a public utility, preferring instead to send more money to their investors, and betting on being able to pull yet more funds from ratepayers to cover the costs of their malfeasance. Investment firms expect in the modern era to be able to continually extract wealth from the businesses they own, without really putting paid to the first word of the name… “investment” is a continual arrangement, where you offer funds to support a venture, and profit in a commensurate way when the business does profit. That doesn’t mean that you always profit, even if the leaders (who you have supported the selection of) make choices that result in negative impacts.

This has some of the same feeling as Centerpoint Energy after that 2021 cold wave shut down gas facilities in Texas. Customers are bearing the burden of costs that wouldn’t have needed to be imposed if facilities were appropriately managed in the first case. In Washington, we shouldn’t either. If you were impacted by the storm, you should submit a complaint to the UTC.

Letter to my legislators

As I draft this letter on the 23rd of November, I am sitting in heated, well-lit comfort in Seattle. My friends, colleagues and neighbors across Lake Washington are still without power since the windstorm on Tuesday, November 19th. The latest notice we’ve received is that some locations should expect power back by Monday, November 25th, six days after the storm.

While I’m aware that PSE’s territory includes difficult terrain, I also note that Snohomish County is similarly rural or exurban & their Public Utility District already is back up to 99% coverage at time of writing this. Notably, from PSE’s quick facts, they have 1.2 million electric customers, to SnoPUD’s 377k — but as of time of writing, while SnoPUD has around 6k customers still without power, PSE has over 70k still without power. If it were simply a matter of scale, I could understand a ratio of 4, not ten. Instead, in their reports PSE is describing having to make significant repairs to most of their substations—an issue faced by no other local utility, as far as I can tell.

I believe that PSE’s leadership should be required to explain why this recovery has gone so poorly, why they were insufficiently prepared, and what their emergency planning response will be for future significant weather events. If it has indeed been a matter of these executives enriching shareholders at the expense of ratepayers’ service level, as seems to be the case, then an appropriate response should be explored by the attorney general’s office.

The worst aspect of coming out of the storm just fine is realizing that depending on the accident of where you ended up during the storm, your outcome is drastically different. That alone is an indication of the disparity in service level, but if the argument is that a private company like PSE is supposed to provide a superior experience to a publicly owned utility, well, see whose lights are on.

Response from my rep

I sent that email on Saturday. I didn’t expect a reply until Monday, so… imagine my surprise when I looked at my email midmorning on Sunday, and there was already a reply!

Dear Mr. Lewis:

Thank you for contacting me to express your concerns about the disparity in how Puget Sound Energy served its customers in the aftermath of the bombogenesis cyclone that hit the Puget Sound last week compared to the outcomes of a local public utility district. I think you raise several good and important points, so I am hoping you will share your thoughts with the state agency that regulates this industry, the Washington State Utilities and Transportation Commission. I am pasting herein a link that will redirect you to the UTC Consumer Complaint page, though you may wish to explore other sections of the agency website. I will also note that the UTC, as does every state agency, receives public comment on specific rate change requests and at its regularly scheduled meetings. If you wish to offer your comments to the UTC at a future meeting, please refer to this link.

Thank you, again, for reaching out to share your concerns about the management of essential utility services by Puget Sound Energy.

I was in fact already planning on sending the same note, with an addendum, to the UTC. I was still glad to hear back that my rep understood.

Contacting the UTC

Now, I felt like for the utilities commission, I should provide some more context as to why this would matter, especially as I’m not a customer of PSE’s for electricity. Here was my preface to them:

The following is the letter I sent my state legislators; I’m including its text in full in this complaint, with some added remarks. While my home electricity is supplied by SCL, my workplace is in PSE territory and was offline for four days; if I were not able to work from home during the outage, my ability to work at all would have been heavily impacted—and if I were hourly, I wouldn’t be making any money this last week. While PSE has remarked repeatedly that they’re working across an enormous range, I would still note that they are the only utility to have experienced any widespread, lasting outages. Given that the UTC’s mandate & vision is to ensure that investor-owned utilities provide the same outcomes to their customers as public utilities, it’s clear that PSE is failing to do so, and catastrophically so.

If PSE’s leadership were more willing to invest in long term maintenance projects, and in routine maintenance of way clearing around their power lines, I’m reasonably sure they would have seen a lesser impact from this storm than these catastrophic, service-area-wide outages.

If you live or work in PSE’s service area and you were impacted by the storm, you should also file a complaint with the UTC. I’ll update this post if I get a reply from them. I may also revise these remarks further and make a public comment at some point.