4. The Settlement Agreement
The proposed Settlement Agreement is an all party settlement and resolves the remaining issue raised in the current proceeding. No protests or comments were filed in response to the Joint Motion. Rather than summarize every term of the Settlement Agreement attached to the Joint Motion, we summarize the key portions of the Settlement Agreement as follows.
In light of the unreasonableness finding in SCE's ERRA compliance proceeding and in accordance with ALJ Wilson's December 23, 2010 Ruling, Joint Parties met and conferred regarding next steps in this proceeding. As noted above, other than the December 28, 2008 Unit 2 outage, no other outages were found to be unreasonable at SONGS during the relevant record period. In its original testimony in this proceeding, DRA had based its SONGS disallowance request on two SONGS outages. However, in the course of litigating the SONGS outages in SCE's ERRA compliance proceeding (A.10-04-002), DRA withdrew its request as to one outage. As a result, the only remaining SONGS outage at issue in this proceeding is the December 28, 2008 Unit 2 outage. As described in D.11-10-002, the December 28, 2008 outage involved the extension of an outage by two days.8
In an effort to avoid the costs and burden of continuing to litigate SDG&E's liability for the December 28, 2008 Unit 2 outage at SONGS (including further discovery, testimony, hearings and briefing), Joint Parties have agreed to settle the issue. Specifically, Joint Parties have agreed that SDG&E will reflect a $368,802 disallowance associated with the December 28, 2008 SONGS Unit 2 outage in its ERRA.9 This amount reflects the replacement energy and avoided costs associated with the two additional outage days. It also corresponds to SDG&E's 20% minority ownership of SONGS and is based on the disallowance methodology used by SCE and approved by the Commission in D.11-10-002.10
8 See D.11-10-002 at 16.
9 Joint Motion at 4.
10 Joint Motion at 5.
