Deeply Disappointed by Pepco's Responses at Hearing

I was deeply disappointed in the responses Pepco gave this morning in the first hearing the Maryland Public Service Commission (PSC) held in its investigation of the electricity provider’s reliability. Pepco officials were unprepared for many of the Commission’s questions, and it was clear the company does not have a verifiable plan for ensuring reliable service for the future. Today’s hearing proved that the PSC must establish accountability standards that will measure the performance of state utilities, including Pepco.

The PSC had ordered Pepco’s chief operating officer and the company’s senior officers responsible for system reliability and construction of maintenance, storm restoration and customer service and communications to appear at today’s hearing. The PSC is working on other aspects of its investigation, including a likely public hearing to be held within the next several weeks in Rockville.

I call upon the PSC to require a reliability plan from Pepco with accountability measures that Montgomery County residents can count on in the future. I also call upon the PSC to require Pepco to prepare an emergency communications and priorities plan. It is increasingly clear that Pepco's actions have been ad hoc, uncoordinated and undercapitalized.

The PSC announced on Aug. 12 that it would begin the investigation after morning and afternoon storms that day left more than 90,000 customers without power. On July 29, following a storm that left more than 200,000 residents without power, we at the Montgomery County Council unanimously sent a letter to the Public Service Commission asking for just such an investigation.

On Aug. 14, I spoke with Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley and told him that the continual series of outages year-round in Montgomery County has made establishing more reliable electric service from the utility a top priority.

We know that sudden winter and summer storms are not always predictable, but having a more reliable system established so we are not paralyzed by these events—and having a better system of response and communication with residents when they do occur—are things that must be addressed. After each of these events, we hear from Pepco about their challenges in delivering better service. Now it is time we hear a plan on what they are going to do to help prevent these problems.

Our letter of July 29 asking for an investigation cited many of the same concerns the PSC identified in deciding to act. In our letter, we wrote: “We are writing to ask the Commission to open an investigation into the reliability of electricity in Pepco’s Montgomery County’s service territory. Our residents and businesses have suffered an unacceptable number and duration of outages for many years, outages that have harmed public health, public safety and the County’s economy. As a distribution-only utility, the quality and reliability of Pepco’s service is exclusively within your authority. We ask you to invoke that authority to ensure our citizens of acceptable levels of reliability.”