* I’m all for infrastructure upgrades, and tend to err on dismissing cost critics because we’ve all seen what can happen when infrastructure is allowed to decay. But companies should undoubtedly do much better…

The same state regulatory agency that granted Nicor Gas permission to bury gas deep underground in rural Livingston county decades ago also approved the company’s request for a record $240 million rate hike, despite evidence of an ongoing methane leak that has persisted for several years.

“Commissioners don’t usually say no to rate hikes,” former Illinois Commerce Commission administrative law judge John Albers explained. “I have seen the ICC be more assertive in its regulatory authority in prior years.”

The four members of the Illinois Commerce Commission who voted to approve the utility company’s third rate hike in four years — three of them appointed by Governor J.B. Pritzker — shrugged off concerns about “extraordinary spending” raised by the Attorney General’s office. In state records filed with the ICC, the Attorney General’s office said Nicor “failed to explain” why the company “regularly and substantially [exceeded] its budget” with $50.6 million in “cost over-runs” on costly projects “at ratepayer expense.”

Nicor argued it “can face unexpected physical and natural conditions at any and every phase of a project,” and “that some individual projects will incur costs higher or lower than estimated based on the presence or absence of various field conditions.”

After a Target 3 investigation revealed an ongoing methane leak at Nicor’s largest gas storage field in rural Ancona, Nicor spokeswoman Jennifer Golz outlined a number of recent infrastructure upgrades at the company’s oldest gas storage site in Illinois.

* From Crain’s a few weeks ago…

Commonwealth Edison is budgeting substantially more than the historically high, capital spending levels it laid out last year, now that parent Exelon is dividing its regulated utilities, like ComEd, from unregulated power plants, like Exelon’s nuclear stations in Illinois.

In an extensive investor presentation today, ComEd boosted its previous capital spending outlook from 2022 until 2024 by $300 million, to $7.6 billion from $7.3 billion. In 2024, the year after the utility’s controversial formula rate-making authority expires, ComEd’s capital spending budget is 10% higher than what it forecasted last February. […]

The average annual capital spending budget for ComEd from 2022 through 2025 is $2.56 billion. That’s 20% higher than the average $2.13 billion ComEd spend each year from 2017 until 2021, according to Securities & Exchange Commission filings.

It’s also well above the $2.38 billion average for the four highest-spending years during the smart-grid project, in which ComEd installed smart meters in every home and business and invested heavily in making the grid more reliable.