Austin, Texas.- Most of the power outages in Houston following Hurricane Beryl should be resolved within the next two days, the city’s main utility said Monday, as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott threatened to punish CenterPoint Energy even after the power was restored.
The Public Utility Commission of Texas, the state’s regulatory agency, announced Monday that it had launched an investigation mandated by Abbott into CenterPoint’s storm preparation and response as hundreds of thousands of residents were left without power for more than a week after the storm. The governor has given the company until the end of July to submit plans to protect its power supply during what could be an active hurricane season and to trim trees and vegetation that threaten power lines.
But some energy experts question whether Abbott and Texas regulators, whose leaders are appointed by the governor, have done enough so far to get tough on power companies or make transmission lines more resilient in the nation’s largest energy-producing state.
“What CenterPoint is showing us with their repeated power outages is that they seem incapable of doing their job,” Abbott said Monday in Houston.
Spokespeople for CenterPoint, which has defended its response and the pace of restoring outages, did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment Monday.
A week after Beryl made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane — downing power lines, uprooting trees and causing branches to crash into power lines — the storm’s damage and prolonged outages have put the resilience of Texas’s electrical grid under renewed scrutiny.
In 2021, a winter storm plunged the state into a deep freeze, knocking out power to millions of residents and pushing the Texas grid to the brink of total collapse. In the wake of the deadly outage, Abbott and state lawmakers promised changes to ensure Texans would not be left in the dark in dangerously hot and cold conditions.
Unlike that crisis, which was caused by power outages, Beryl brought strong winds that toppled power lines and knocked out power to about 2.7 million homes and businesses. Most of those were concentrated in the Houston area, where CenterPoint reported Monday that it had restored power to more than 2 million customers. But more than 200,000 remained without power.
Houston-area residents have endured heat and humidity, standing in long lines for gasoline, food and water, and traveling to community centers to find air conditioning. Hospitals have seen an increase in patients with heat-related illnesses and carbon monoxide poisoning caused by improper use of home generators.
“This is not a failure of the entire system,” Abbott said. “This is an indictment of a company that has not done its job.”
At a special meeting of the Houston City Council on Monday, Houston resident Alin Boswell said she had been without power for eight days and had not seen anyone from CenterPoint in her neighborhood until that morning. She 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 people.
“You all and CenterPoint had a preview of this debacle back in May,” Boswell told council members.
Ed Hirs, an energy expert at the University of Houston, said the failures go beyond CenterPoint. He said regulators have been reluctant to ensure that transmission lines are made more resilient and that trees are sufficiently pruned.
Hirs said Abbott and other leaders who focus solely on the utility after Beryl are looking for a scapegoat.
“Of course, none of them have a mirror nearby,” he said. “It’s not CenterPoint exclusively. The regulatory pact has been totally broken.”
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 the long-term plans and expenses that would be needed to make its electric system more resilient, from tree trimming to storm and flood resistance 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 focus its efforts this year on more than 3,500 miles (5,630 kilometers) of its estimated 29,000 miles (46,670 kilometers) of overhead power lines in 2024.
According to Michael Webber, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Texas who specializes in clean energy technology, vegetation management remains a key factor in avoiding further power outages when the next storm hits. But it is only one of the problems facing electricity providers.
Policymakers must rebuild Texas’ energy grid to adapt to its changing climate, Webber said.
“We have designed our system for the climate of the past,” he said.
The company has defended its preparation for the storm, saying it has hired about 12,000 additional workers from outside Houston. It has said it would not have been safe to place those workers within the storm’s projected impact zone before Beryl made landfall.
In a message to CenterPoint clients Sunday night, CEO Jason Wells wrote that the company had made “remarkable” progress.
“The strong pace of restoration is a testament to our preparedness (and) the investments we have made in the system,” Wells wrote.
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