LIPA to release 2024 budget, power needs plan as new trustees join board

Three new LIPA trustees, including its first chairperson in three years, will face a deluge of new numbers, power studies and decisions as the utility on Wednesday releases its 2024 budget, its plan for new power resources and its performance analysis of grid manager PSEG Long Island.

Chairwoman Tracey Edwards takes a position that hadn’t been officially filled since former Glen Cove Mayor Ralph Suozzi resigned as chairman in 2021. (Trustee Mark Fischl, who leaves the board this week, had run the meetings as vice chairman for years.) Also joining the board Wednesday are attorney Claudia Lovas and David Manning, Brookhaven National Laboratory director of government affairs and a former National Grid executive vice president.

Edwards in an interview Tuesday said her approach as she takes the chair position at LIPA is to focus on customers.

“Customer service and ratepayers, that’s what we have to keep our eye on,” she said. “Continuous improvement. If we’re focused on making progress and working together cooperatively then we’re good."

Edwards said she believes that "ultimately everybody wants to do a good job and that’s all we have to do is have our eye on the same goal. It’s like a family.”

Edwards, a former state Public Service Commissioner who recently took the position of senior vice presidents at Las Vegas Sands, previously served as regional vice president of operations for telecom giant Verizon, including for a time overseeing call centers.

 “I’m going to lean on my experiences with Verizon,” she said. “I was fortunate enough to have had the best customer service results and I’m going to make sure we’re doing the same” at LIPA and PSEG.

LIPA on Wednesday will release a $4.19 billion operating budget for 2024 that includes a $32 million increase for new initiatives, such as time-of-day rates and better cybersecurity, $13.4 million for increased wages, $13.5 million for higher retirement costs, $8 million for higher debt-service payments, and $27 million for inflation not tied to labor costs. PSEG recently inked a new contract with its unionized workforce that includes a cumulative 15.5% wage increase over four years.

Customers can expect to see a roughly $19 increase in their monthly bills next year compared with projected monthly bills this year, largely because power supply costs — the cost of buying energy and fuel — are expected to increase next year by $237 million, compared with actual costs in 2023. Part of the increase is $79 million more for renewable energy purchases.

LIPA on Wednesday is also expected to release its power map for the coming decades known as an integrated resource plan, which lays out the working vision for injecting more green energy into the grid while retiring fossil fuel plants. As Newsday has reported, LIPA expects around half its energy to come from offshore wind over the next half decade and expects to begin retiring fossil fuel plants. It’s a huge balancing act, and fueled in part by state law and initiatives that seek to eliminate carbon-based power sources by 2040.

Among the issues the new board will be wrestling with are efforts by PSEG and LIPA to make improvements in customer call centers, where declining performance compared with prior years led PSEG to launch a call-center “get well” plan to improve performance.

On a separate track later this week, a state legislative committee on the future of LIPA will be meeting at Hofstra University to vote on a final report and proposed legislation that would seek a LIPA transition to a fully public utility.

The move, if approved by the full State Legislature and Gov. Kathy Hochul, would put LIPA directly in charge of its own fate, after PSEG’s contract expires in 2025. That would mean a significantly increased role for the authority along with projected savings of up to $80 million a year, studies have said. PSEG says the current arrangement with PSEG running the system is best for customers.

By Mark Harrington

mark.harrington@newsday.comMHarringtonNews

Mark Harrington, a Newsday reporter since 1999, covers energy, wineries, Indian affairs and fisheries.