Utility News

The Times Leader:

The approximately $580 million deal between UGI and Southern Union Co., the Houston, Texas, parent company of PG Energy, closed Thursday. The sale expands UGI’s reach into 13 counties in northeastern and central Pennsylvania and adds approximately 158,000 customers. Prior to the acquisition UGI had 307,000 customers in the southeastern and south central parts of the state. Its electric utilities operation serves nearly 62,000 customers in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

UGI Penn Natural Gas is a separate subsidiary of Reading–based UGI Utilities, itself a subsidiary of UGI Corp. in Valley Forge.

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Topix:

Utility and telephone companies are prepped and ready for Tropical Storm Ernesto in South Florida.

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The Wall Street Journal (subscription):

How much competition is there in U.S. telecommunications? So much that even California regulators have finally noticed. Last week the state’s Public Utilities Commission voted 5-0 to lift decades-old price controls on land-line phone companies.

The move was instigated by Rachelle Chong, who was appointed to the Commission in January by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. According to a Los Angeles Times report, this is the first time in 18 years that California has altered its rate structure. Think about all that has happened in telecom in the past two decades, from the proliferation of wireless devices to Internet telephony, and you get some idea of how far past due these changes were.

Other states, including Texas, Florida, Indiana, Colorado and Massachusetts, have eased their anti-competitive price controls in recent years, but the decision to do so by the nation’s largest state is still significant. “The California Public Utility Commission is used by Commissions in other states as a standard,” says Barry Aarons, who follows telecom at the Institute for Policy Innovation. “They reason, ‘If California is willing to do this, we shouldn’t be scared to do it ourselves.’”

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The New York Times:

Kinder Morgan Inc., one of the largest pipeline operators in the country, said yesterday that it had agreed to a sweetened buyout offer of $15 billion from a group of investors led by its chairman and co-founder, Richard D. Kinder.

The buyers, who plan to take the company private, agreed to increase their cash offer to $107.50 a share, from an offer of $100 a share made in May. In addition, they will assume $7 billion of debt, Kinder Morgan, of Houston, said in a statement.

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E-Commerce News:

One of the nation’s phone giants backed down from a plan to continue collecting a rebated tax, under a new name, rather than pass along the savings to customers.

While another phone giant, Verizon Communications, said it does not intend to change a similar plan of its own.

More on Verizon…

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News Channel 8:

Starting October First, people living in public housing in Annapolis will have to pay their own electric bills.

Annapolis has been one of the few cities in the region that pays the bills for public housing residents, but the housing authority’s mounting debt to Baltimore Gas and Electric has risen to about $450,000. Federal subsidies for the utility costs ended last year.

Housing officials say they plan to offer rent concessions to help tenants pay the new bills.

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The Times-Standard:

A bouquet of Mylar balloons disrupted power to nearly 2,000 Pacific Gas and Electric customers Wednesday morning when they got caught up in electric wires.

PG&E spokeswoman Lisa Randle said the disruption to most of the 1,844 customers was temporary, just a few minutes at most, but nine customers didn’t have their power back for two hours.

The shortages occurred between 9 and 10 a.m.

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The New York Times:

An elevator lurches to a halt and the lights flicker. Hours pass before a maintenance man can pry the door open and rescue those trapped inside. Once outside they find a city nearly at a standstill, no subways running and traffic snarled. Time to join the millions streaming up the avenues or across the bridges for a long walk home, and scramble to find food for dinner.

That’s what happened to some New Yorkers during the blackout on August 14, 2003, the largest electrical failure in American history. It affected 50 million people across the Northeast. For some it was inconvenient; for others, like those trapped in the elevators or on subway trains, it was alarming; and for an unfortunate few, it was deadly. The investigations concluded that it all started because untrimmed trees grew into three high-voltage power lines. But the ripple effect went on to expose a frail electrical transmission system in a country that consumes more and more electricity. The estimated cost of that single, widespread failure was $12 billion.

Was this a call to arms? Did we fix our electrical grid? Not exactly. Legislators, regulators, and companies have taken baby steps, but hardly enough to restore confidence.

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Washington Post:

AT&T Corp. on Wednesday filed suit in federal court to unmask and halt the actions of 25 people who allegedly posed as customers to gain unauthorized online access to private phone records.

Some 2,500 customers’ records were stolen, AT&T alleges in its civil complaint. The affected customers have been notified and access to their online accounts frozen, the company said…

Thieves are after more than phone records… “They steal your cable TV records, your satellite TV records, your gas and electric records and all the rest,” said Douglas, who edits Privacytoday.com, an information security Web site. “Every interaction we have is being recorded somewhere, and every minute thieves are working trying to figure out how to gain access to that information and use it for profit.

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Reuters:

The U.S. government sued Maine officials on Tuesday to block their demand that Verizon disclose whether it gave the government’s spying program access to its customer data, documents showed.

The government’s civil suit, submitted by the U.S. Department of Justice to a district court in Maine, said the Maine public utilities officials’ attempts to obtain information on Verizon’s involvement with the National Security Agency (NSA) were “invalid”.

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