Lots more people in positions of power with things to say about CenterPoint’s performance this week. Here’s Rep. Sylvia Garcia:
U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia is tired of feeling left in the dark by CenterPoint Energy – both literally and figuratively.
On Wednesday morning, the Congresswoman, whose district wraps around much of the eastern edge of Houston, sent a strongly worded letter to the energy company’s CEO, Jason P. Wells, demanding answers as to why more than a million Houstonians remained without power two days after Hurricane Beryl slammed into the city.
“I write today to inquire about CenterPoint’s preparation for Hurricane Beryl, which left millions of your customers in the Houston region without electricity for now going on day 3,” Garcia wrote. “With scorching temperatures in the area, CenterPoint’s inability to restore power more quickly is creating a public health crisis forcing people to recover from a hurricane while they survive extreme heat.”
In the three-page letter, the Congresswoman poses several questions, including: Why were so many workers deployed the day after the storm ended, and not the same day?; Why was the outage tracking map never brought back online in the nearly two months after the derecho event?; and What is CenterPoint doing to improve reliability? How is this going to be prevented in the future?
“We just want to make sure that CenterPoint knows, in a strong and loud way, that people are unhappy,” Garcia said. “There are 1.3 million people who are still waiting. They need to know: Hey guys, this is Houston. It ain’t our first rodeo. We’ve been through this before. Why do we have to go through this every time we have an event?”
She lamented the fact that CenterPoint seems eager to share news when their quarterly earnings reach more than $1 billion, “but we don’t know what they’re planning to do to make our power go up in a minimum of two days.”
Logan Anderson, a spokesperson for CenterPoint, declined to comment on the letter Wednesday afternoon. “The company intends to respond to Congresswoman Garcia directly,” Anderson wrote in an email.
“I would consider a Congressional hearing about this at a later date, but I would like to hear a response first and sit and visit with them,” Garcia said Wednesday.
These are good questions, and I appreciate Rep. Garcia asking them. I hope she gets her answers. I will say, I would love to see some specific things that our leaders want from CenterPoint, along with at least a discussion of what resources are needed and what oversight will be required. They don’t need to have all the answers themselves, but their goals should be clear.
Here’s Mayor Whitmire and City Council.
Mayor John Whitmire criticized CenterPoint’s response to Hurricane Beryl at a Houston City Council meeting Wednesday, saying the energy company “needs to do a better job” restoring power to millions of customers who lost it when the storm tore through Houston.
“That is the consensus of Houstonians, that’s mine,” Whitmire told reporters after the meeting.
Whitmire, however, declined to give a grade on CenterPoint’s performance.
“I’m not in the business to grade,” Whitmire told the Houston Chronicle. “I’m in the business of saying, ‘Let’s get it done. Let’s fix it.’”
[…]
Council Member Edward Pollard, who represents the southwestern part of the city, told [Brad Tutunjian, CenterPoint’s vice president of electric distribution operations and power delivery] that he was getting calls from senior citizens and families with kids who didn’t understand why their power wasn’t being turned on, and he asked if CenterPoint would be changing its model.
“There has to be something that can be done or a learning lesson from how frequently and hard the storms are getting for us to be able to react and respond quicker,” Pollard said.
Tutunjian conceded that the company had to make changes. Vegetation management could be an option, he said, and more efforts to bury lines and make the system more resilient through modernizing the grid.
Tutunjian said CenterPoint as able to get around 175,000 customers back online quicker simply because they had more updated equipment.
Council Member Abbie Kamin asked about the cost of both the hurricane and the derecho in May. Tutunjian said the derecho cost the company “many millions” and that could not give a number on how much damage the hurricane caused.
Residents have raised concerns about CenterPoint’s outage map crashing after the derecho. Tutunjian said before Hurricane Beryl hit that CenterPoint had been working to get a cloud-based system up and running for its outage tracker and hopes to have it working by the end of the month.
All due respect, but I think it is in the Mayor’s purview to provide an assessment in this circumstance. I mean, “needs to do a better job” could mean “you’re an A student, please explain this C+ to me” or it could mean “you failed miserably”. Let’s at least be more specific about what we want, if for no other reason than we’ll know when and if we’re getting it.
On a side note, the Mayor also took a shot at the Astros.
“George Brown [Convention Center didn’t] have energy yesterday,” Whitmire said during Wednesday’s City Council meeting. “We have 1,500 students in the Marriott and the Hilton, but we’ve got a ballgame going on down the street two blocks [away]. We’ve got to get our priorities right.”
Not really sure what that has to do with anything. Would the GRB have had energy if the Astros had postponed their games? There are absolutely times when things like sports need to be set aside while more immediate matters are given proper attention. I don’t think the Astros were required to do that here.
And then there’s Greg Abbott.
Two days after Hurricane Beryl knocked out power for a record 2.26 million CenterPoint customers in the Houston area, Gov. Greg Abbott said he is directing the Public Utilities Commission to study why the region has not been able to access electricity “on multiple occasions.”
Abbott, who is currently on an economic development trip in Asia, said in two TV interviews on Wednesday that he wants to find out “why this is repeatedly happening in Houston.”
[…]
“They should not be losing power,” Abbott said in an interview with Bloomberg TV. “I want to find out: Was there a structural flaw with regard to the electrical delivery system? … Or was this a personnel issue of not having enough power personnel in all the right locations to get power back and going again?
“All I can tell you is this: I want the PUC to provide information to both me and the Texas Legislature so that we will be able to act on it next year to make sure events like this never happen again,” Abbott told Bloomberg TV.
Thomas Gleeson, the chair of the PUC, said at a Monday press conference that the agency would work with local utility companies after the storm to conduct a post-event analysis of the state’s response “to review what we’ve done and try to get better.” Abbott’s directive seems to focus just on the Houston area.
You mean like all the stellar work you did to fix the grid after Uri in 2021? Get back to me when you have something on that. And have fun on your little trip to Asia, we’re doing just fine without you.
The PUC has its own feedback.
The Texas Public Utilities Commission urged CenterPoint Energy on Thursday to communicate better with its 1 million-plus customers still without power, but leaders of the state’s utility supervisor stopped short of interrogating or criticizing the company’s response to Hurricane Beryl.
Members of the PUC, which regulates Texas electricity providers, encouraged CenterPoint officials at a public hearing to better address widespread accusations that the company has been disorganized and inefficient following Beryl. CenterPoint customers have been particularly frustrated with a lack of detailed, accurate information about when to expect power back.
About 2.2 million Houston-area customers, or 80 percent of CenterPoint’s customer base, lost power following the storm Monday. About 1.1 million remained without electricity Thursday afternoon, and CenterPoint officials said about 500,000 could remain without power into next week.
PUC Chairman Thomas Gleeson “strenuously urged” the company to rebuild trust with Houstonians after the disaster response concludes.
“Get out into the community. I don’t know if that’s town halls or what it looks like, but go talk to your customers,” Gleeson said. “Go talk to those residents about what happened, about ways that you feel you all can improve. Get feedback from them about their view on what can be improved.”
[…]
The hearing marked “the first step in the process” of evaluating how utility companies responded to the storm, Gleeson said.
Commissioners did not detail what actions will come next, but Gleeson said he talked to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick about the response to Beryl and “they’re going to figure this out.” Earlier this week, Patrick questioned CenterPoint’s response and said he expects a report on their preparations and response once restoration is completed. The company always completes post-mortem reviews after emergencies.
“We will probably end up filing a report as we head into the legislative session about our learnings, and potentially legislative solutions we may need,” Gleeson said.
Yes, that report plus potential legislative solutions are what I’m talking about. But see above in re: not fixing the grid after Uri. The “needs to do a better job” thing very much applies to the PUC.
Politicians playing politics. Garcia us a stupid moron if she thinks power should be completely restored in 2 days. That’s unrealistic given the amount of damage.
Whitmore is a grumpy old man being stupid.
Anyone who thinks Centerpoint could stand up a new cloud based perfectly working outage tracker in 6 weeks know nothing about software development, especially scalable to millions of users.
Could Centerpoint do better? Sure, but assessing the damage requires linemen walking neighborhoods, going into back yards and looking at the lines, feeding that back to the planners who prioritize the work.
As for Abbott et al, they are just stupid morons.
Re: “Mayor John Whitmire criticized CenterPoint’s response to Hurricane Beryl at a Houston City Council meeting Wednesday, saying the energy company “needs to do a better job” restoring power to millions of customers who lost it when the storm tore through Houston.”
I’d bend over and grab my side from laughing so much if I wasn’t sweating profusely, having to stay with out of town friends, and emptying my fridge of perishable items. ‘Needs to do a better job’ about sums up Whitmire’s performance to date.
Still trying to figure out what Whitmire was talking about when he blamed previous administrations for downed trees.
Whitmire is way above his ability.
Next statement I expect to hear out of Whitmire or Abbott’s mouth is a suggestion that we start tidying up the local Houston forests with a rake so this whole power outage thing doesn’t happen in the future.
Here’s a suggestion – require ALL new development in Harris County run electrical service underground. That’d be a start…
Until yesterday morning, I had not seen a single utility truck anywhere in my travels around the city. And I still can count all I have seen on one hand. On the other hand, the City of Houston not only picked up my limbs from the storm Wednesday evening, but had a crew of three folks with rakes following the truck to neaten the pick-up. Still no power, so staying with friends, but my neighbors with pets are sleeping in their cars running AC all night since it is cooler there than in the house. My house measured 92 degrees Wednesday late.
You can thank Turner for heavy trash pickup, after all the problems heavy trash pickup had been on schedule in our neighborhood. Won’t take long for Whitmire to eff that up.
Went to local food store, 21 center point trucks sitting there.
I don’t think Centerpoint is allowing outside crews to do anything until they get a work ticket/order. The process of evaluating problems and assigning crews to fix them is still being handled only by a limited number of Centerpoint personnel, and is a likely bottleneck.
No crews working that I have seen.
I contacted every one of my elected officials this morning, from local government to federal government, and the only one who responded was Abbie Kamin’s office who asked me for my specific address so they could ‘flag it for CenterPoint’. That’s how local (et al) government is supposed to be responsive and function.
The parts about solar power are of interest here:
http://denninginstitute.com/pjd/PUBS/CACMcols/cacmJun19.pdf
IIRC in TX you do not have the option to disconnect from the grid and use your solar panels independently in a power outage. That needs to change. Think about how much better off many people who lost power would be if they could have those 3 solar powered outlets mentioned in the article. You could at least maintain refrigeration and run some fans.
I was able to salvage about half the stuff in my freezers with ice and ice chests, but it pained me to have to throw some things out (even though my insurance will cover it). I have a strong moral objection to food waste.
During hurricane season I try to keep a minimum of food in the freezer and use ice bags for cold ballast instead. That way I am all set to save tbe food. But I got caught by these early season events. If I had the solar setup I would disconnect and use it.
My old plan was to eat most of the food in the freezer during June and July, then restock in late September. But it looks like it’s time to adjust that.
Pingback: Saturday Beryl roundup | Off the Kuff