Missouri’s largest electric utility believes a bill aimed at reducing competition and giving monopoly providers an advantage in building transmission lines will avoid cost overruns and deliver better results for customers.
In its home state, where it stands to benefit, Ameren Missouri has offered its full-throated support to legislation aimed at giving the company the right of first refusal to build transmission lines, and argued opponents’ worries about limiting competition are “disingenuous at best.”
“Do you want local companies with roots in our state and communities, with a vested interest in our future, who build infrastructure for the long term interest in Missourians, who live here building these major transmission projects?” Warren Wood, Ameren Missouri’s legislative and regulatory vice president, asked in a Missouri House committee hearing earlier this month.
But in 2016, when Kansas considered similar legislation — which would have cut Ameren out of bidding in favor of that state’s utilities — the Missouri provider was opposed. It took a position diametrically opposed to its current one and strikingly similar to the arguments it called disingenuous.
At that time, Shawn Schukar, Ameren’s senior vice president of transmission business development, said competition had reduced costs in other parts of the country.
“Concerns about the ability of non-incumbent transmission developers to provide safe and reliable service to electricity consumers in Kansas are unfounded,” Schukar said. “Ameren’s operating subsidiaries have been providing safe and reliable transmission service across multiple states for years.”
Both Kansas and Missouri are considering what’s commonly called “right of first refusal,” or ROFR legislation. Supporters say a federal order opening transmission lines to competitive bidding hasn’t worked. Even a former federal official who voted for the proposal said it had failed.
Both Ameren and Evergy, which serves customers in Kansas and western Missouri, support the idea.
But opponents — an unlikely alliance of consumer and clean energy groups, right-leaning free-market organizations and transmission line developers — say eliminating competition would drive up costs of transmission projects. Those costs are then borne by customers in rate increases.
Lawrence Willick testified in opposition to the legislation on behalf of LS Power, which builds transmission lines across the country.
“Of course monopoly utilities aren’t happy with having to compete,” he told a Missouri House committee, “and you’re going to hear a lot of disparaging things about companies like ours, and I ask you to see them for what they are. They’re exaggerations and falsehoods, and really scare tactics.”
Ameren’s turnaround
Ameren says the company’s thoughts on the right of first refusal legislation have changed since it opposed the idea in Kansas in 2016.
In a Missouri House committee hearing this year, Schukar said the policy issued by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that opened the transmission market to competition about 10 years ago had failed.
