Courtesy - IURC.
INDIANAPOLIS — The powerful Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission (IURC) will meet with the state’s “big five” investor-owned utilities about their reactions to storms a month ago, according to a Tuesday filing.
It’s a response to, but not a fulfillment of, an inquiry aimed at AES Indiana. The subsidiary of Virginia-based AES Corp. serves Hoosiers living in the Indianapolis area.
AES says storms left an estimated 100,000 customers without power between June 29-July 4. That prompted customer advocates to ask regulators for an investigation.
“We’re pleased the Commission has finally broken their silence and look forward to participating in what we hope will be an inclusive, transparent, and robust investigation,” said Citizens Action Coalition Executive Director Kerwin Olson in a statement. His organization and the state Office of Utility Consumer Counselor jointly filed the investigation request.
AES Indiana did not return a request for comment. But the utility argued, in a July 18 response to the joint request, that existing state regulations are sufficient and no investigation is needed.
The commission will hold a technical conference with AES Indiana on September 11, in person at downtown Indianapolis’ PNC Center and online.
In an order filed Tuesday, regulators asked the utility to provide an after-action summary of the storms, including their impact, the number of customers affected, the utility’s response to the outages, the “common causes” of the outages, and “any lessons learned from the restoration processes.”
And they told AES Indiana to be ready to discuss challenges it faced in restoring power — staffing, supply chain, or otherwise — and to answer questions on customer communications, being proactive, gaps in power restoration processes, mutual aid, and more.
But in a news release, the commission cautioned that the technical conference was for “information gathering” only and that it hadn’t yet decided whether to launch a formal investigation.
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