Dive Summary:

• After a decade of running Northeast Utilities and Connecticut Light & Power (CL&P), Charles W. Shivery will get $34.6 million in compensation, as well as stock awards and pension benefits as part of his retirement package.
• Shivery came under fire recently after CL&P was found to be unprepared for outages caused by Hurricane Irene as well as a freak October snowstorm in 2011.
• In addition to the costs associated with storm recovery, CL&P spent $25 million to catch up on necessary tree-pruning that had been neglected, but only after the utility had received substantial public pressure.

From the article:

James P. Torgerson, chief executive of UIL Holdings, the parent company of United Illuminating, earned $2.5 million last year, up from $1.3 million in 2006 when he got the job. That's a 47.8 percent raise. Between 2000 and 2011, CEO pay packages at the largest privately owned utilities have increased by 150 percent on average, according to a survey conducted for Hearst Newspapers by Longnecker & Associates, a Houston compensation consulting firm. That brought the average to more than $6 million a year.

Over much of the last decade, executive pay soared in many industries, from banking and financial services to academia. CEO pay in America did plunge about 37 percent in 2011 compared to 2000, largely due to the 2008 recession, an Economic Policy Institute analysis shows. But it is recovering, and has increased by 20 percent since 2009. ...