And finally, from that interview, we explore a few of the PUC's harshest criticisms of BEL. At the end of their initial decision, the regulator raised multiple issues that they interpreted as deficiencies in vital information BEL failed to submit.
Once again, the BEL chairman vehemently disagrees. But, in the same way that Chairman Marshalleck was plain-spoken about what he calls the "Fire and Brimstone Approach" that the PUC is taking, he insisted that we were "nit-picking" - or "quibbling" as he called it - about data which the regulators say is key to assessing BEL's proper management of its services
Here's the discussion on the PUC's insistence that they need to submit all dispatch decisions on where they are getting electricity to power the grid:
E. Andrew Marshalleck, SC - Chairman, BEL's Board of Directors
"What is dispatch? You see we have a number of different independent power providers and dispatch is deciding how we are going to use each one on a mix every day. So we order power from each of them in a certain mix every day. But the prices from each of these service providers are fixed by contract. So the gains to be made by the different dispatch are marginal at best. You're never going to achieve any meaningful price reduction through rejuggling how we dispatch a set pool at set prices. Now there are gains to be made through proper dispatch, but they're not of the weight of the significance that the impression is being given that they carry. Remember last year BEL was wrap on the knuckles for saying that we use the dams too much that we reduce the reservoir levels the end of September going into October to levels that put at risk electricity generation in the other year. So if you look at how that turned out with the benefit of the data now, in fact the dam levels had recovered fully by January, so there was no risk as they has touted was a major problem. It turned out to be entirely irrelevant and now we have the contrary. So in that case we use it too much. Now they're saying we use it too little and use BAPCOL too much. Now BAPCOL is very expensive and I am aware of an instance where we had to use BAPCOL over the cheaper methods and that is after the hurricane when certain transmission lines had to be repaired. Now you break the transmission lines, you cut them off in order to repair them. So everything in the north of the break was fed from Mexico and everything from the south was fed from BAPCOL while the repairs were being done. There was no way of escaping that and to suggest that we use BAPCOL for power when CFE was available ignores the fact that we were repairing the lines."
