Ohio congressman seeks to lift FirstEnergy license

CHICAGO -- - Ohio Congressman and presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich recently asked officials in his state to revoke the operating license of FirstEnergy Corp., saying mismanagement at the utility appeared to have played a major role in last week's blackout.

"It is clear that FirstEnergy is a monopoly that has not effectively served the residents of Northeast Ohio," said Kucinich, who represents a Cleveland area district hit by the power outage.

FirstEnergy owns transmission lines that have been targeted as a possible source of last week's blackout in the Northeastern United States and Canada.

Kucinich said a "long history of mismanagement and neglect" prompted him to ask the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio to revoke the company's license to operate in northeast Ohio.

"As a result of deregulation, FirstEnergy, like many power companies, has been driven by a motivation to put profit above the public interest," he added.

"This culture has led to a lack of maintenance and deterioration of their infrastructure. These factors, not new to FirstEnergy, appear to have played a major role in last week's blackout that caused 50 million people to lose power."

Ellen Raines, a spokeswoman for the Akron, Ohio-based utility, said it was "premature to draw conclusions about the outage ... and we are focused on gathering and analyzing data of events that occurred on our system prior to and during that outage and providing that data to the U.S. Department of Energy task force."

She said the important thing now "is not casting blame but determining what exactly led to this event and what needs to be done to prevent it in the future."

Earlier in the day the utility warned that rolling blackouts might be needed in the greater Cleveland area unless customers reduced hot weather demand.

Kucinich, one of a number of Democrats seeking his party's presidential bid, is pursuing the nomination as a "progressive" promising to work for universal health care and abolition of the North American Free Trade Agreement.