About 30 years ago, you’d have needed sonar to find David Hutchens. He was somewhere in the deep, running the nuclear power plant on a ballistic-missile submarine. When he was done with the U.S. Navy, he took his love of power to dry land, working his way up the ranks of an Arizona electric utility that became UNS Energy. Hutchens rose to CEO, and in 2014, Canada’s Fortis Inc.—looking to bulk up its holdings—acquired the company and Hutchens with it.
You had a setback last November when S&P moved Fortis’s credit rating outlook to negative. Apparently you were surprised by that. What happened? Yeah, I guess that’s fair. Look, I’m an American. I don’t like to say anything bad about the Canadian policy, but it is. The U.S. has been through this, right? Back in the Obama administration, trying to pass federally mandated renewable energy standards and greenhouse gas reduction to go beyond that, they just realized, “Oh my gosh, this is just too tough to do from a federal perspective. These are really things that are regulated by the states.
Why did the B.C. Utilities Commission deny your application for a capital project to increase gas pipeline capacity in the Okanagan?