PUC releases its initial CenterPoint report

Some reasonable recommendations in there.

The Public Utility Commission of Texas on Thursday made public the results of its investigation into the performance of CenterPoint Energy and other Houston-area electric utilities during Hurricane Beryl and the May derecho, offering up about a dozen suggestions for improvement.

Among the report’s conclusions were the need for legislative action to increase penalties for poor service and to expand performance standards.

The assessment came at Gov. Greg Abbott’s directive after widespread outrage from Houston-area residents over CenterPoint’s handling of Beryl. The PUC has also launched a separate audit of CenterPoint at the request of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. 

CenterPoint Chief Communications Officer Keith Stephens said in an email that the company has “heard the calls for change loud and clear.” He pointed to CenterPoint’s ongoing Greater Houston Resiliency Initiative aimed at strengthening the utility’s preparedness and responsiveness to major storms. CenterPoint commissioned an independent, third-party review of its Beryl response and has completed or is working to complete two-thirds of the review’s recommendations, Stephens said.

“We continue to review the Public Utility Commission of Texas staff’s recommendations on further resiliency actions and remain committed to working together with our state’s lawmakers and regulatory officials to achieve our shared goal of building the most resilient coastal grid in the country,” Stephens said.

See here for the background. As noted, there’s a separate audit now in the works, which will likely focus more on the $800 million generators. The full report is here, and while it’s longer than you want to read, the executive summary lists the recommended actions, of which the ones of the most immediate interest are:

1. Utilities should include neighboring utilities, local governments, and emergency services in annual hurricane and major storm drills.
2. The Commission should require pre-storm communication procedures in emergency operations plans.
3. Utilities should incorporate outage tracker disruptions and high user demand as scenarios in annual hurricane and major storm drills.
4. The Legislature should codify a customer’s right to information about restoration times and the right to contact an electric service provider by phone.
5. The Legislature should consider establishing a framework and penalty structure to assess IOU service quality during major outage events.

There are 14 total recommendations, with most of the rest being of the “utilities should consider” and “utilities should assess” variety. I think these above are all reasonable – if you read my earlier post, I was not very optimistic about this, so kudos to the PUC for exceeding my expectations – but now it’s up to the Lege and apparently the PUC and I guess the likes of CenterPoint themselves to follow through. We’ll see how that goes.

Related Posts:

This entry was posted in Hurricane Katrina and tagged , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.