I’m sure there will be more of this to come. But we need action, not just talk.
Seen at I-10 and Sawyer
Texas utility regulators grilled CenterPoint Energy executives Thursday over their performance in the days following Hurricane Beryl, when millions of Houston-area residents lost power, as the utility’s leaders repeatedly apologized and acknowledged the company’s shortcomings in its preparations and response.
At a regularly scheduled meeting of the Public Utility Commission of Texas, Commissioner Jimmy Glotfelty said the storm should be a wake-up call to CenterPoint and every other utility in the state.
“Whether it be a wildfire … or a big storm or a derecho, I don’t care what it is, you all know your system the best, but you’ll have to do better. The customers deserve better, and we all are giving you a return that expects better,” Glotfelty said.
CenterPoint can recover its operating and maintenance expenses through electricity rates approved by the PUC and passed onto consumers. It can also recover the costs of capital investments and earn a 9.4% rate of return if those expenditures are approved by the commission.
CenterPoint CEO Jason Wells said the company was committed to reearning the trust of the Houston area.
“I take personal accountability on areas where we fell short of our customers’ expectations,” Wells said. “Most importantly, I want to apologize. While we cannot erase the frustrations and difficulties so many of our customers endured, I, my entire leadership team, will not make excuses. We will improve and act with a sense of urgency.”
The hurricane came ashore in Matagorda on July 8, a Monday, and knocked out power in the Houston area to a record 2.26 million CenterPoint customers. Power was restored to about half of those customers within four days, still leaving hundreds of thousands of Houstonians without power as temperatures hovered in the mid-to-high 90s.
On Thursday, Wells promised to improve communications with customers, replace approximately 1,000 wooden power poles with composite poles and lease more small mobile generators on a short-term basis. As of July 16, CenterPoint had nearly doubled its vegetation management workforce, Wells said. CenterPoint will also hire for a new position in the company’s executive team who will make improvements to “every aspect” of emergency response, he said.
Some of the comments Wells made to the PUC echo his comments to the Chronicle on July 11, when he said, “I think we could do a better job of communicating expectations with our customers, and I personally own that.”
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Alyssia Oshodi, CenterPoint’s director of corporate communications, said after the meeting that the company planned to roll out a new cloud-based outage tracker Aug. 1 that would show outages at the neighborhood level. The company planned to roll out a further improved tracker in the first quarter of 2025 that will show whether a particular household’s meter is on or off, she said.
Glotfelty said CenterPoint should consider bringing in-house some of the work currently done by vegetation management and lineworker contractors if it’s economic to do so. He said CenterPoint must also better coordinate its requests for mutual assistance crews from other utilities and how it prestages those crews.
“There are a lot of things that went wrong here, and a lot of things that you all need to fix,” Glotfelty said.
I’ve said all this before, but it bears repeating and emphasizing: We need specific items for CenterPoint to do and not do, we need them codified into laws and regulations, we need sufficient oversight to ensure they are being followed, and we need enforcement mechanisms that work. Sorry for dropping a buzzword on you, but someone needs to introduce Jason Wells to the concept of SMART goals, because “improve communications with customers” is meaningless drivel. Tell me exactly what you aim to achieve, how you intend to do it, and by when. And then make sure the Lege and the PUC write it all down and hold you to account for it. Anything less is a waste of time. The Trib has more, and you should also read this Chron story about how the city of Houston’s Office of Emergency Management had to roll their own power outage map on the fly after CenterPoint’s crapped out. Either we generate laws and regulations to make a repeat of that situation unlikely in the extreme or we’re doing it wrong.