The Public Service Company of New Mexico for the most part secured a win Friday in the Four Corners Power Plant case and aimed for another in its proposed merger with two companies.
PNM and Avangrid of Connecticut agreed in a news release to go along with numerous modifications laid out by a Public Regulation Commission official for the proposed merger, which also would involve Avangrid parent company Iberdrola of Spain.
About the same time Friday afternoon, a hearing examiner, or quasi-judge for the PRC, recommended to the five-member regulation commission that PNM’s proposed departure from Four Corners Power Plant should generally receive the commission’s approval.
Hearing examiner Anthony Medeiros recommended Friday that PNM’s giveaway of the Four Corners plant to Navajo Transitional Energy Co. “is in the public interest.” Medeiros also recommended approval for PNM’s plan to issue $300 million in bonds in part to cover capital costs at Four Corners.
The two cases in question — the proposed merger and the Four Corners abandonment — have been at the center of an intense summer and fall for the Public Regulation Commission.
The merger proposal was scorched in a recent report filed by another PRC hearing examiner, Ashley Schannauer. Schannauer wrote in a recommendation filed on Nov. 1 that “the potential harms outweigh the benefits” of the merger.
Schannauer criticized the companies for not disclosing pertinent facts and for ignoring some of his orders. The companies indicated in their news release Friday that they would submit to Schannauer’s many modifications in order to get the merger accomplished.
Robert Kump, an executive of Avangrid, said in the statement that “we have committed to the Hearing Examiner’s recommendations.”
Pat Vincent-Collawn, chief executive officer of PNM, said Schannauer’s modifications pointed to a way for the proposal to succeed. “We all want what’s best” for the state, she said in the news release.
Mariel Nanasi, head of New Energy Economy, said PNM and Avangrid weren’t quite so gracious in a formal filing with the commission Friday. The applicants took exception to Schannauer’s observation that no real agreement had been reached among interested parties.
They wrote in that filing that “the record reflects there is substantial agreement” among almost all of the many groups that participated in negotiations.
“There’s a conflict between their press release and this document,” said Nanasi, a critic of the merger proposal. Nevertheless, the news release represented a public pledge that PNM and Avangrid were committed to fulfilling the hearing examiner’s recommendations.
The proposed merger still must go to the commission. PNM’s abandonment of the Four Corners Power Plant in northwestern New Mexico also must go to the commission.
But while entities such as the Sierra Club, Bernalillo County and New Energy Economy criticized the Four Corners abandonment as doing nothing to close the plant, Medeiros wrote that he saw a “net public benefit” in the general plan.
PNM intends to pay Navajo Transitional Energy Co. $75 million to take the coal-driven plant off its hands. It’s in NTEC’s interests to keep the plant open because it owns the coal mine that fuels the plant, critics say. Further, many Navajos and other residents in the area are employed there.
Medeiros did criticize part of the agreement in which PNM pledged that it wouldn’t vote to close the plant as long as it was a part-owner, until early 2025. He asked that this be amended.
But he accepted a key provision that would allow PNM to float low-interest bonds over 20 or 25 years to cover capital improvements in the plant that critics said were a waste of money.
Nanasi said Friday night in a written statement that approving the Four Corners abandonment plan would be “a travesty of justice.”
