FIRSTENERGY 3 companies to be subject of hearings

One hearing on electricity reliability will be in Sharpsville.
HARRISBURG (AP) -- The reliability of three companies owned by FirstEnergy Corp. will be the subject of public hearings this month, from Easton to Erie, as Pennsylvania regulators look into whether electricity service to 1.2 million homes and businesses has been substandard.
If the investigation finds that the reliability of the utilities -- Pennsylvania Power Co., Metropolitan Edison Co. and Pennsylvania Electric Co. -- has slipped below standards, the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission will set up a corrective plan.
Any customer who wants to testify can show up before the meeting and sign up, said utility commission spokesman Eric Levis. The hearings begin Tuesday and run through April 15.
A hearing is scheduled for 1 p.m. April 13 at Clark Borough Social Hall, 2798 Winner Road, Sharpsville.
The state's Office of Consumer Advocate is encouraging customers of the three companies to testify about their experiences with the length of power outages, the companies' response to restoring power, and any problems with the maintenance of power lines, poles or trees growing around them.
"There have been problems in much of the FirstEnergy territory, so it's important -- to the extent that people can -- to let the commission know what their experience has been," said Irwin "Sonny" Popowsky, the state's consumer advocate.
Hearing agenda
At each hearing, the president of the power company that serves the area will give a short opening statement, and then be on hand with some members of the operations staff to listen to testimony and speak with customers, said Scott Surgeoner, a spokesman for the Akron, Ohio-based FirstEnergy.
The FirstEnergy companies are working to improve reliability, Surgeoner said. He cited the replacement of a 11/2-mile underground cable near Reading that has been the source of some outages.
"We have made improvements in reliability over the past couple years, but still have a ways to go," Surgeoner said. "We're tackling [problems]. Some of this isn't an overnight kind of thing. It takes time. Work with us and bear with us."
FirstEnergy acquired Metropolitan Edison and Pennsylvania Electric when it merged with New Jersey-based GPU Inc. in 2001. It also owns several power plants in Pennsylvania, including Bruce Mansfield Station, a huge coal-fired plant in Beaver County, and the nearby Beaver Valley nuclear power plant.
Largest power outage
Last year, FirstEnergy was implicated in the nation's largest power outage ever.
A U.S.-Canadian task force investigating the Aug. 14 outage that affected 50 million people pointed to the failure of a FirstEnergy computer system that monitors electricity flow in causing the blackout.
It also said the company allowed trees underneath transmission lines to grow too tall, triggering several outages when the lines sagged.
That led to a series of transmission-line failures that knocked out more than 263 power plants across the Midwest, Northeast and Ontario, the report said.
FirstEnergy has criticized the report as incomplete and maintains that it shouldn't be singled out because there were other problems in the Midwest power grid.