Texas gov. slams Houston utility as power outage continues

By Jim Vertuno and Nadia Lathan | Associated Press

AUSTIN, Texas — The majority of Houston outages that followed Hurricane Beryl should be fixed within the next two days, the city’s main utility company said Monday as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott threatened to punish CenterPoint Energy even after the lights come back.

The Texas Public Utility Commission, the state’s regulatory agency, announced Monday it had launched an investigation Abbott demanded into CenterPoint’s storm preparation and response as hundreds of thousands of residents sweltered without power for more than a week after the storm. The governor has given the utility until the end of July to submit plans to protect the power supply through the rest of what could be an active hurricane season, as well as trim trees and vegetation that threaten power lines.

But some energy experts question whether Abbott and the Texas regulators, whose leaders are appointed by the governor, have done enough before now to get tough on utilities or make transmission lines more resilient in the nation’s biggest energy producing state.

“What CenterPoint is showing us by its repeated failure to provide power, is they seem to be just incapable of doing their job,” Abbott said Monday in Houston.

Spokespeople for CenterPoint, which has defended its response and pace of restoring outages, did not immediately return an email seeking comment Monday.

A week after Beryl made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane — toppling power lines, uprooting trees and causing branches to crash into power lines — the damage from the storm and the prolonged outages has again put the resiliency of Texas’ power grid under scrutiny.

In 2021, a winter storm plunged the state into a deep freeze, knocking out power to millions of residents and pushing Texas’ grid to the brink of total collapse. Following the deadly blackout, Abbott and state lawmakers vowed changes that would better ensure that Texans would not be left in the dark in dangerous cold and heat.

Unlike that crisis — which was caused by failing power generation — Beryl created high winds that brought down power lines and knocked out power to about 2.7 million homes and businesses. Most were concentrated in the Houston area, where CenterPoint reported Monday that it had restored power to more than 2 million customers. Still, more than 200,000 remained without power.

Houston-area residents have sweltered in heat and humidity, stood in long lines for gas, food and water, and trekked to community centers to find air conditioning. Hospitals have seen a spike in patients with heat-related illnesses and carbon monoxide poisoning caused by improper use of home generators.

“This isn’t a failure of the entire system,” Abbott said. “This is an indictment of one company that’s failed to do its job.”

In special meeting of the Houston City Council on Monday, resident Alin Boswell said he was on day eight without power and had not seen anyone from CenterPoint in his neighborhood until that morning. He said the city and the company should have known the potential for damage after storms in May knocked out power to more than 1 million.

“You all and CenterPoint had a preview of this debacle in May,” Boswell told council members.

Ed Hirs, an energy fellow at the University of Houston, said the failures extend beyond CenterPoint. He said regulators have been reluctant to ensure that transmission lines are more resilient and trees are sufficiently trimmed.

Hirs said Abbott and other leaders who are solely zeroing in on the utility after Beryl are looking for a scapegoat.

“Of course, not one of them have a mirror around,” he said. “It’s not CenterPoint exclusively. The regulatory compact has totally broken down.”

CenterPoint has at least 10 years of vegetation management reports on file with Texas regulators. In April, the company filed a 900-page report on long-term plans and expenses that would be needed to make its power system more resilient, from tree trimming to withstanding storms and flooding to cybersecurity attacks.

In a report filed May 1, CenterPoint said it had spent nearly $35 million on tree removal and trimming in 2023. It said it would target efforts this year across more than 3,500 miles (5,630 kilometers) of its estimated 29,000 miles (46,670 kilometers) of overhead power lines in 2024.

Vegetation management remains a key issue for avoiding another power outage when the next storm hits, said Michael Webber, a University of Texas mechanical engineering professor with a focus on clean energy technology. But it’s just one ongoing problem for power providers.

Policy makers must rebuild Texas’ energy grid to adapt to its changing climate, Webber said.

“We’ve designed our system for weather of the past,” he said.

The utility has defended its preparation for the storm and said that it has brought in about 12,000 additional workers from outside Houston. It has said it would have been unsafe to preposition those workers inside the predicted storm impact area before Beryl made landfall.

In a message to CenterPoint customers Sunday night, CEO Jason Wells wrote that the company had made “remarkable” progress.

“The strong pace of the restoration is a testament to our preparation (and) investments we have made in the system,” Wells wrote.

Lathan, who reported from Austin, Texas, is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.