Two northeast Ohio lawmakers are teaming up on a bill that would require utility companies to reimburse ratepayers when they lose food and medicine in prolonged electricity outages. It comes after power outages have forced hundreds of thousands of Ohioans to throw out everything in their refrigerators, sometimes repeatedly.
The bill from Reps. Tristan Rader (D-Lakewood) and David Thomas (R-Jefferson) would require utilities offer an automatic $50 daily credit when power outages go on for more than 16 hours in normal conditions and more than 36 hours during gray-sky conditions. The credit would be offered after 72 hours in catastrophic conditions, defined as severe weather causing outages that hit over 10% of a utility's customers.
The bill would also require utilities to pay $250 for loss of food and medicine if the household can provide an itemized list of what had to be thrown out. If the household can show proof of actual losses, the reimbursement could go up to $600.
"Sometimes there's catastrophes that happen. Sometimes a truck hits a telephone pole and the power goes down," said Rader in an interview. "But a lot of times in Lakewood, it's just been because a transformer blew all on its own because it's way outside of its useful life essentially, or it's not been maintained properly—all kinds of things that are going wrong that are no fault of the consumer. They're no fault of the ratepayer. So we're just saying that if your power goes out, you deserve to be compensated. You deserve to be made whole because it's not your fault when the grid's not meeting its obligation to provide you power."
There's nothing that allows ratepayers to ask utilities to reimburse them for lost food or medicine in Ohio right now, said the leader of the state agency that argues for consumers before the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio.
"The law is not written that way. When you have food outage or food spoilage is there's just nothing in the current law that would protect consumers," said Ohio Consumers' Counsel Maureen Willis. "Consumers, however, can file complaints at the PUCO and raise those issues before the PUCO—not much remedy, but certainly an opportunity to raise those concerns."
Ohio's four major investor-owned utilities—AES, American Electric Power, Duke Energy and FirstEnergy—are each worth tens of billions of dollars in market capitalization, with Duke Energy alone valued at more than $93 billion. Rader said these dollar figures aren't a lot of money to those utilities but they are to ratepayers.
"It may only add up to a few hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's not a lot for a utility. But if it happens repeatedly, we're hoping that the automatic, essentially the penalty on the shareholders of those companies will hopefully incent better behavior and incent them to make the improvements they need in the grid," Rader said. "By itself, it may not have that impact directly or immediately, but I think coupled with legislation like performance-based rate making or something like that, I think you can actually get to the results you need."
The bill is still being drafted and other lawmakers could still sign onto it. But Rader said it's their intent to introduce it soon.
"We're going to move as fast as we can. I think people need help now," Rader sad. "We're just going to have to see what the appetite is, but we know it's already bipartisan. It's already got support on both sides of the aisle."
But it won't have much time to work through the legislature before the end of the session in December.
