Edison International is “intellectually open” to revising the $4.7 billion settlement for the early closure of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) that best serves its customer and ownership base, President and CEO Pedro Pizarro said Thursday.
Speaking to financial analysts during the company’s quarterly earnings call, Pizarro also made it clear the utility is prepared to take legal action against what it would consider an unfair resolution to the matter.
The 2014 settlement approved by the California Public Utilities Commission would require utility customers to pay $3.3 billion of the closure costs for the nuclear power plant’s premature shutdown in 2013. However, the commission reopened the matter in May 2016 after finding that former CPUC President Michael Peevey in 2013 had conducted ex-parte talks on the matter in Poland with a-then executive for SONGS majority owner Southern California Edison (SCE), an Edison International subsidiary.
The state Office of Ratepayer Advocates and other groups that had been party to the settlement then demanded it be reconsidered, and CPUC in December ordered the parties into talks for potential changes. The commission has set a deadline of Aug. 15 for the parties to report on the status of the meet and confer process.
Pizarro said Thursday the process is confidential, so he could not discuss specifics of the discussions.
“Let me just reiterate what I said before that we’ve approached this proceeding fully and [are] taking it very seriously,” he told analysts. “And at the end of the day, if we and the other parties involved end up agreeing on a revision to the settlement that we think is in the interest of our customers and our shareholders, then we are certainly intellectually open to that and we’d be looking at that in the context of the various other alternatives outside of a mediation process including the potential scenario of returning to litigation.”
Executives during the call made no mention of the separate lawsuit over transferring the rest of SONGS’ spent nuclear fuel from wet storage to an expanded dry-storage pad along the Pacific coast.
Edison on Thursday reported $278 million in net income for the second quarter of 2017, down from $280 million in the same period of 2016. Earnings per share landed at $0.85, dropping slightly from $0.86.
Net income for Southern California Edison was down by $11 million, $0.04 per share, on a year-over-year basis: from $318 million to $307 million, and $0.98 to $0.94. Edison, in a press release, attributed the drop to reduced revenue associated with prior overcollections.
The company’s operations outside of SCE, in the “Edison International Parent and Other” line item, tightened its losses in the quarter. The company reported a $27 million loss, compared to $36 million for second-quarter 2016.
Edison has increased its earnings guidance for the full year, from a previous range of $4.04-$4.24 per share to the new range of $4.13 to $4.33.
“We continue to experience success around our operational and service excellence initiatives and cost control and effectiveness more generally,” Edison Chief Financial Officer Maria Rigatti said during the conference call. “However, we have not made any adjustments to guidance at this point related to these items, as we continue to evaluate the various efforts and other work that may be required. We will update guidance in the third quarter as it has been our practice to reflect any additional changes following the summer season.”
