Ameren Sabotaging Callaway Nuclear Plant and Their Ratepayers

Ameren is the parent company of Callaway. I'll bet Ameren is insular and certainly Callaway is insular being Ameren owns only a single nuclear plant. A single owner tends to be very expensive. Callaway's LER format looks like it comes out of the 1970s...it need updating. What else at the site needs updating.   

Ameren Missouri owns the Taum Sauk pumped storage plant,^[20] which failed on December 14, 2005, causing extensive damage to the east fork of the Black River and to Johnson's Shut-Ins State Park. Consequently, FERC fined Ameren $15 million. The State of Missouri has sued Ameren for actual and punitive damages, alleging Ameren recklessly operated the plant and put financial considerations from sale of power to other companies over safety, maintenance and engineering. The plant was operated by remote control with no one onsite during pumping operations.

Sounds like this is applicable to Callaway...

"Entergy will need to consider “what’s the right value play as well as what’s the right allocation of resources. And does that free up cash that we could use elsewhere,” he said."

It seems like the special inspection begins from issues on the July shutdown. Why did it take so long for the NRC to call a special inspection? Did it allow Callaway to shred documents and to create phony new ones? It is highly unusable to call a special inspection so late in the game. 

Ameren says Illinois, transmission better places to invest than Missouri

St. Louis-based utility says Missouri regulations make it less attractive than other jurisdictions.

Sept 8, 2015 

Poor baby.

Poor Ameren Missouri. Every time Missouri’s biggest electric utility wants to raise electric rates, it has to hike down to Jefferson City and make its case to the five members of the Missouri Public Service Commission. They are so cruel that Ameren Missouri’s only been successful six times in the last eight years, which means residential customers are getting away with paying only 50 percent more than they did in 2007.

Meanwhile, median household income in Missouri, which was $50,685 in 2007, fell to $46,931 in 2013. The figure for 2014 will be released by the Census Bureau next week. One thing’s for sure: Median income won’t be up 50 percent over 2007.

But Ameren Missouri, poor baby, argues that it’s being squeezed by the PSC. Those regulators make things so tough that Ameren (the parent company) is going to take more of its discretionary investment money to Illinois, where it also owns electric and gas utilities. Also, Ameren is going to spend more of the money that it might have invested upgrading its Missouri infrastructure on federally regulated transmission lines.

It can make more money there than it can in Missouri, where the PSC only allows it a lousy 9.5 percent profit rate.

Something is wrong here. Ameren’s customers in Missouri are paying 50 percent more than they did in 2007. But Ameren’s $4.6 million-a-year chairman and CEO, Warner Baxter, told the Post-Dispatch’s Jacob Barker that over the next five years, the company is planning to make $2.1 billion in new infrastructure investments in federally regulated power lines and $1.1 billion worth of upgrades in Illinois, where it has both electricity and natural gas operations. Missouri, where about half of Ameren’s 2.4 million customers live, would get $800 million worth of improvements. Instead of having two-thirds of Ameren’s assets, Missouri would fall to half or less. All of the investment will create more jobs in Illinois while the Missouri workforce has fallen by 300 workers.

Missouri pays more and gets less.

The reason, Mr. Baxter told Mr. Barker, is that unlike Missouri, Illinois allows utilities to recover the cost of infrastructure improvements before they’re completed. Missouri expects Ameren to actually shoulder the risk itself. It expects improvements to be complete before regulators will approve rate increases that cover their cost.

Back in 1976, while Ameren was building its Callaway County Nuclear Plant, Missouri voters passed a referendum prohibiting utilities from charging for “construction work in progress.” Over the years, Ameren has made several attempts to get the Legislature to overturn the law.

In 2008, as Ameren was considering adding a second nuclear station at the plant near Fulton, there was serious discussion about repealing the anti-CWIP law so that customers could finance the $6 billion project. Just six weeks ago, with estimated costs for building new nuclear plants now upward of $10 billion, Ameren officially withdrew its application to build Callaway II.

Still, that anti-CWIP law means Ameren can’t charge its customers even for less expensive infrastructure improvements — a new substation, for example — until it’s actually online. In 2013, it took a Senate filibuster to kill a bill that would have allowed electric utilities to add infrastructure “surcharges” to their customers’ bills. Gas companies already can do that.

Mr. Baxter told Mr. Barker that Ameren will be “relentless” in seeking regulatory reform during the 2016 legislative session. That would be nothing new; the company is a major political contributor to both Democrats and Republicans. The company and its various operating units pay at least 40 lobbyists to work on its behalf in Jefferson City.

It’s easy to understand why. Ameren is competing for investment capital with all kinds of companies. If you can make 21 percent on Apple shares, why buy Ameren and be limited to 9.5 percent in Missouri? The stock market is not booming this year as it did for the past two years, but last year a guy could have gotten 2 percent more from a Standard & Poor Index fund than he did from Ameren.

On the other hand, Apple doesn’t charge for iPhones until the customer buys one. And Ameren is a monopoly. It doesn’t have to worry about the competition; traditionally, that fact, along with regular dividends approaching 5 percent, makes utility stocks attractive.

But that was the old days. Today being a conservative, reliable utility company is boring. Today Ameren can act like the NFL. If it doesn’t like your state’s regulatory climate, it can take money from your rate base and invest it elsewhere.

The regulatory climate here is anything but onerous; the Legislature has seen to that by gutting the budget of the Office of Public Counsel, which represents consumers before the PSC. The PSC’s staff, too, is regularly outnumbered by Ameren’s lawyers.

The Public Service Commission should see to it that Ameren meets the letter of law, which includes making electric service in Missouri as safe and reliable as possible with the money it takes from Missouri. Illinois can take care 
of it itself.