Maritime Electric makes final arguments in application to recoup $41.2M in Fiona costs

Maritime Electric made its final arguments to the Island Regulatory and Appeals Commission this week in its application to recovery $42.1 million in costs it absorbed from the cleanup after post-tropical storm Fiona struck P.E.I. in 2022.

Representatives from the utility made their case Tuesday during a hearing at IRAC.

The recovery costs, Maritime Electric said, include:

The proposal is for a one-time rate increase of 3.5 per cent for its customers beginning May 1, 2026.

Maritime Electric's assertion is that almost all of the outages during the storm were a result of trees on private property falling on power lines — not the trees within the utility's legal right-of-way where it can cut and trim around power poles and wires.

"What we found during Fiona was approximately 99 per cent of the trees that fell onto our power lines fell from private property. Trees that grow up within the right-of-way do not cause poles to break or wires to fail," Enrique Riveroll, vice-president of sustainability and customer operations with Maritime Electric, said in an interview after the hearing.

The 99 per cent figure is a result of Maritime Electric's own findings, Riveroll said, from field inspectors and damage assessors after Fiona.

When asked whether Maritime Electric had that figure independently verified, Riveroll said it's the utility's own approximation.

"Whether it's 99 per cent or 98 per cent, it doesn't really matter," he said. "The devastation that it caused was dramatic and it resulted in a significant effort to restore power to our customers."

When Fiona made landfall on P.E.I. in September 2022, it quickly became one of the most destructive storms in the province's history.

The storm knocked out power to more than 80,000 customers, some for up to three weeks. Initial projections put insured damages at more than $600 million across affected provinces, with hundreds of millions more in economic impact.

In the aftermath, cleanup on P.E.I. took months. More than three years later, crews are still sifting through debris in some pockets throughout the province.

Maritime Electric has since asked for more legislative freedom to trim trees outside of its right-of-way to prevent future outages and damages from storms, and a consultant's report commissioned by IRAC supported that argument.

"[Maritime Electric's] post Fiona increase in vegetation management investment, including the development of cyclical vegetation clearance programmes are expected to improve overall electrical system performance on blue-sky days," the report from EA Technology said.