Gov. Greg Abbott on Sunday slammed utility CenterPoint Energy, which has yet to restore power for hundreds of thousands of customers in the Houston area, and ordered the company to take steps to improve power reliability.
In his first public appearance since returning from a pre-planned economic development trip to Asia, the governor asked CenterPoint to send his office a detailed plan by the end of the month outlining how it will prepare differently for future hurricanes this season. Abbott said the plan must include better preparation for linemen, increasing the number of workers to restore power and trimming trees that could fall on power lines.
If CenterPoint fails to comply with his request, the governor said he will issue an executive order imposing his own requirements on the company. And he said that if the utility is unable to “fix its ongoing problems,” the state would have to reconsider the breadth of the territory it serves. CenterPoint maintains the wires, poles and electric infrastructure serving more than 2.6 million customers in Texas across the greater Houston area and some coastal communities like Galveston.
“Maybe they have too large of an area for them to be able to manage adequately,” Abbott said. “It’s time to reevaluate whether or not CenterPoint should have such a large territory.”
The governor on Sunday also sent a letter to Thomas Gleeson, chair of the Public Utility Commission of Texas, ordering him to launch an investigation into CenterPoint and deliver a report on its findings by Dec. 1. He said allegations that CenterPoint was “penny-pinching and cutting corners” must be investigated. “Was CenterPoint protecting Texans, or was it protecting its own pocketbook?” Abbott said at the press conference.
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The press conference marked Abbott’s first public briefing since the storm made landfall in Matagorda County on Monday. The governor spent the past week visiting politicians and business leaders in South Korea, Taiwan and Japan. Patrick acted as governor while Abbott was abroad, requesting a disaster declaration from President Joe Biden and holding briefings throughout southeast Texas in the aftermath of the storm.
Abbott emphasized that lawmakers will work together to craft laws during the next legislative session to improve power reliability but that action must be taken now since more hurricanes could be looming. Hurricane season runs from June 1 to Nov. 30 and federal forecasters predict the highest number of storms ever for the 2024 season.
Abbott asked that CenterPoint remove vegetation around power lines no later than Aug. 31. CenterPoint officials said during a meeting before the PUC this week that damaged trees were a leading cause of infrastructure damage and outages after Beryl.
Abbott also cited reports that CenterPoint may have been “caught off guard” by Beryl’s magnitude and the level of devastation it caused in Houston. The storm was originally forecast to have the greatest impact in South Texas but it turned northeastward and ended up hitting areas further north.
By the end of the month, the company must specify how they will pre-stage sufficient workers to immediately respond to future power outages, Abbott said.
I’m not going to pretend to have anything resembling respect for Greg Abbott, so feel free to discount what I’m about to say by whatever amount you want. My first reaction is just to wonder what exactly happens if Abbott scales back CenterPoint’s territory. What does that even mean? What provider would take over? Would they inherit the same equipment that CenterPoint now uses or would they have to install their own? How would customers’ billing get switched over? I’m sure CenterPoint will take this threat seriously, but I’m at a loss to understand how it could be carried out.
As far as the specific actions Abbott mentioned, I don’t have any quarrel with them, but is CenterPoint expected to pay for them all out of their own cash flow, or can they pass those costs along to us? How will we even know if they do that? And again, what exactly are the consequences for not meeting the deadlines? That goes back to my first set of questions, because I have no idea who the understudy is for CenterPoint. Are we even sure they’d be better than what we have now?
Finally, as far as the future legislative agenda is concerned, that too is what I would want to see happen, I just don’t have any trust that our Legislature is up to the task. We were promised a lot of things after the freeze of 2021, and I don’t think anyone can say with a straight face that the grid is better positioned now than it was three years ago.
Chron business columnist Chris Tomlinson puts it this way.
CenterPoint is a $19 billion, for-profit corporation granted a monopoly over a hundred years ago to manage and maintain the transmission and distribution of electricity across the Houston region. This regulated utility failed to deliver power to 85% of its customers during the height of a mild hurricane.
In a perfect world, the Public Utility Commission would have ensured CenterPoint maintained a grid resilient enough to withstand a stronger storm. Instead, elected officials are asking the wrong questions about the emergency response.
“I’ll tell you whether I’m satisfied or not when I have a full report of where their crews were, when they were asked to come in and how quickly they get power back. That will be the tale of the tape.” Patrick said earlier this week.
Wrong. The important question is, why did so many CenterPoint powerlines and poles snap so easily? Why wasn’t the grid built stronger, and why wasn’t vegetation cut away? These are CenterPoint’s primary responsibilities for which they receive a guaranteed profit from customer bills, and they didn’t fulfill them.
CenterPoint officials have stammered their responses.
“What we’ve seen now is more impact than what we originally thought that we were going to see,” Alyssia Oshodi, CenterPoint director of communications, told KHOU television.
CenterPoint had plenty of warnings. So is the problem shoddy maintenance work by CenterPoint subcontractors after the company trimmed 700 employees since 2020 to boost profits? Did the company cheap out on materials and engineering standards? Does the company believe blacking out 85% of its customers in a Category 1 hurricane is acceptable?
Is the PUC allowing CenterPoint and other corporations to put profits ahead of people?
I suspect the answer is yes to all of these questions because that’s what happens when one political party runs the show for 26 years. Politicians get lazy when they think voters won’t hold them accountable. Incumbents prioritize making powerful corporations happy, a problem true of all political parties.
Investigative journalists are digging, but only someone with subpoena power can get to the emails, memos and data inside CenterPoint headquarters in Houston.
An attentive attorney general would have already sent a letter demanding the company preserve records. But Texas’ top law enforcement officer, Ken Paxton, is too busy sending fundraising emails promising vengeance on his enemies.
Following the 2021 blackouts, Abbott promised an investigation and corrective action to fix the state’s primary electric grid. He proclaimed the problem solved that summer. Yet, within weeks, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas began declaring a series of emergencies, warning of possible blackouts. The grid is still broken.
Patrick and Paxton promised to investigate why the energy system failed during Winter Storm Uri. Those inquiries have yet to yield results, with lawmakers too busy defending oil and gas campaign donors who pocketed tens of billions of dollars in profit from Texans’ suffering.
The point is that Abbott, and the Public Utility Commission that he appoints that oversees CenterPoint, could have been asking these questions and taking these actions and demanding these results before Beryl blew through. But they didn’t, so now he’s out there throwing his weight around. The operational failures are CenterPoint’s, but the oversight failures are theirs. So color me skeptical that Abbott et al are going to do a better job of it now. Houston Landing has more.
Ah yes… the invisible hand of the free market. With an assist by Enron it just shot us the bird. Large chunks of River Oaks and the villages still being dark does have a nice bit of schadenfreude to it, though.
I will point out, when talking numbers of customers, the power company is referring to service addresses, not the numbers of persons in residence. So 2 million customers isn’t 2 million people, it is perhaps 3 million people or more.
I don’t trust Abbott, period. He has an easy target bashing Centerpoint, but this could also signal not giving Centerpoint any money, so any improvement to the grid will be likely be paid for by the customers without any help from the state of Texas.
Texas ranks last in quality of life, and this is without taking these infrastructure fails into account:
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/13/10-states-worst-quality-of-life-america.html
Let’s also remember that the likes of Patrick (and Abbott too) are in the business of making life as miserable as possible for Houston and Harris County. _Of Course_ Patrick didn’t ask for relief money right away, and had to have teeth pulled to do it … nobody should be mystified by this, and we should not expect them to live up to any of these promises to make it better for the future.
I would like to see CenterPoint being required to spin off their electric service business from their natural gas supply business. That won’t happen, but it should. A standalone electric service business would be much more likely to qualify for a federal infrastructure grant. As it is, the best we can hope for is some kind of unfunded mandate from the state.
My incompletely informed layman’s view is that CenterPoint wanted to perform repairs with a minimum of overtime, and a minimum of temporary employees, even if this required longer discomfort for customers. That might be good for corporate profits, but has soured the community on CenterPoint for a long time to come.
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