A decommissioning company intervening in state-level proceedings necessary for EnergySolutions’ purchase of a Wisconsin nuclear power plant wants to drag out the process with last-minute contentions, EnergySolutions argued Monday.
NorthStar’s April request to include Kewaunee Power Station’s annual decommissioning funding status report in the Wisconsin Public Service Commission’s (WPSC) review of the plant’s sale to EnergySolutions from Dominion Entergy was “ill-timed” and did not “advocate or reassert a substantive position,” the company said Monday in a filing with WPSC.
Including such a document in the record would not affect any of WPSC’s decisions on the sale, EnergySolutions said, “including whether there are sufficient resources” to properly decommission Kewaunee.
NorthStar’s contention “seems more designed to incite objection and create delay than to add any meaningful evidence to the record,” EnergySolutions said.
WPSC is just weeks away from deciding whether to approve the plant’s sale. A spokesperson for the state regulator told Exchange Monitor April 3 that the commission was scheduled to discuss the transaction May 12.
Since it was allowed to intervene in the proceedings back in September, New York-based NorthStar has called into question the financial terms of the plant’s sale.
NorthStar argued that Wisconsin should have entered into a fixed-price contract with EnergySolutions which included financial failsafes to ensure that funds left over in the plant’s decommissioning trust fund are returned to ratepayers once the job is complete. NorthStar has also said that it could have decommissioned Kewaunee for a lower price than EnergySolutions — around $500 million compared with its competitor’s projected $724 million.
EnergySolutions and Dominion agreed to Kewaunee’s terms of sale in May 2021, but WPSC must approve the transaction before it can move ahead. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved the Carlton, Wisc., plant’s sale March 31.
