Missed this last week.
No longer seen at I-10 and Sawyer
The Public Utility Commission of Texas took a step toward an audit of CenterPoint Energy, fulfilling Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s directive issued in the wake of widespread criticism of the Houston-area electric utility’s handling of Hurricane Beryl.
PUC Chairman Thomas Gleeson directed the commission’s staff to begin vetting third-party organizations that could audit CenterPoint. The results of the audit should be delivered to the PUC in April, so it has time to make recommendations before the end of the legislative session in June, Gleeson said at the commission’s Thursday open meeting.
“There are a few things we can look at, (such as) CenterPoint’s policies and procedures when procuring goods from a third party. We can look at how they evaluate customer needs for where the mobile generation needs to go, including looking at their emergency operation plan and how it deals with this,” Gleeson said.
Gleeson cited the Public Utility Regulatory Act, which gives the PUC authority to regulate utilities, as the basis for the “management audit,” a term that is not well-defined in the law. There is no record of the PUC auditing a utility under this provision in recent years, spokesperson Ellie Breed said in an email.
The PUC is already investigating the performance of CenterPoint and other Houston-area utilities during Beryl and the May derecho, with a report due to Gov. Greg Abbott and the legislature by Dec. 1. Breed said the audit’s sole focus would be on CenterPoint, and that further distinctions between the two inquiries would be made clear when the request for proposals from auditors was issued.
Beth Garza, former director of the watchdog organization that oversees the Texas wholesale electricity market, said Gleeson’s comments on procurement hint that the commission is likely to focus on CenterPoint’s $800 million lease of generators in its audit.
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Patrick first called for an audit during a rare Houston meeting of the PUC in October, citing testimony from cities and consumer associations that the utility is overcharging customers.
“I expect you to do that audit,” Patrick said to the commissioners during the Houston PUC meeting in October. “I want to know how much they have been overcharging, if they’ve been overcharging the customers at CenterPoint, and for how long.”
Steven Aranyi, Patrick’s communications director, said Thursday that the lieutenant governor “requested the audit to see if CenterPoint spends ratepayer money smartly on issues that matter, or if they waste money maximizing profits at the expense of ratepayers.”
CenterPoint has strongly contested that it’s overcharging. In fact, CenterPoint invested $75 million in system improvements and vegetation management that were not billed to customers in 2023, Oshodi said.
The company has proposed a plan to forgo $110 million in future profits, which is more than half of the profit anticipated from the generators. The company announced Thursday that it has completed all 42 of its initial post-Beryl commitments to improve, including trimming trees along more than 2,000 miles of power lines, installing more than 1,110 stronger poles, launching a new outage tracker and hosting listening sessions across the region.
I approve of the effort, but I’ll wait to see what it actually encompasses before going beyond that. I don’t have much faith in this government’s accountability efforts, but enough people are mad at CenterPoint that there might be some real follow-through. We’ll know more soon enough.
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