The Public Service Commission meets Wednesday at 9 AM and first up on the agenda will be the two winter storm events that knocked out power to tens of thousands of Louisianans.
Entergy, Cleco, SWEPCO, and a handful of co-ops will be in attendance to report on what happened. Commissioner Foster Campbell said the objective is accountability.
“We should regulate them and we should ask the tough questions and if we don’t watch it they rock us to sleep up there,” said Campbell, who was speaking on Talk Louisiana with Jim Engster.
MISO, the super-regional power authority that ordered the statewide rolling blackouts last week, will also be on hand to report to the PSC.
Many customers remain frustrated with the outages in the midst of such a historic freeze. Campbell said all that happened as providers were pulling in big profits.
“I was looking at SWEPCO, last year they made a 12 percent profit margin, I think that is way, way too high. Entergy Corporation is making 11.5 percent,” said Campbell.
Campbell said they should look into whether infrastructure needs to be better maintained to avoid situations like this in the future.
“I think some companies probably could spend more money on tree trimming and not worry about the profit they are making for shareholders, that’s what I am troubled by, these guys are making huge profits,” said Campbell.
The PSC is expected to propose an investigation into the winter storm outages and allegations that natural gas providers took advantage of the situation to jack up prices.