Massachusetts’ highest court has reduced penalties imposed against two electric utilities by state regulators for their poor responses to a pair of 2011 storms that left hundreds of thousands of customers without power for days.The Department of Public Utilities fined National Grid $18.7 million for its response to the outages caused by Tropical Storm Irene in August 2011 and by a snowstorm in October. NStar was fined $4.1 million.
The Supreme Judicial Court on Thursday cut NStar's penalty in half, saying the agency did not prove that the utility failed to respond in a timely way to downed power lines after the storms.
The justices reduced National Grid's penalty by $900,000.
The court did not change a $2 million penalty against Western Massachusetts Electric Co.
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