This op-ed by the Chronicle's Chris Tomlinson has been circulating on social media this morning.
CenterPoint Energy failed during Hurricane Beryl, but who will hold them accountable?Someone needs to investigate CenterPoint Energy’s abject failure to maintain a grid capable of withstanding a category 1 hurricane. Unfortunately, after recent severe weather events, Texans cannot rely on those in power to reveal the truth, let alone find a solution.
Gov. Greg Abbott called on the Public Utility Commission of Texas to dig into why the Houston region has experienced multiple outages in recent years. “They should not be losing power,” Abbott told Bloomberg TV while in Asia, where he’s leading a trade delegation.
Electric transmission and distribution utility executives, including one from CenterPoint, briefed the PUC on Thursday morning, but commissioners didn’t ask any tough questions. Instead, they grasped for explanations that excused the utilities for widespread outages that have lasted for four days.
The PUC is supposed to represent Texas consumers, but the commissioners' coziness with the companies they are supposed to regulate betrayed the unlikeliness CenterPoint will suffer consequences for its atrocious performance in maintaining power lines and polls in the Energy Capital of the World.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick held a press conference Thursday. In his role as acting governor during a natural disaster, he was more focused on slamming Democrats and deflecting from his own failures than questioning why more than 1 million Texas homes and businesses will remain without power through Saturday.
Our public officials are unfazed by the millions of Texans suffering from this crony capitalism.
CenterPoint is a $19 billion, for-profit corporation granted a monopoly over a hundred years ago to manage and maintain the transmission and distribution of electricity across the Houston region. This regulated utility failed to deliver power to 85% of its customers during the height of a mild hurricane.
In a perfect world, the Public Utility Commission would have ensured CenterPoint maintained a grid resilient enough to withstand a stronger storm. Instead, elected officials are asking the wrong questions about the emergency response.
“I’ll tell you whether I’m satisfied or not when I have a full report of where their crews were, when they were asked to come in and how quickly they get power back. That will be the tale of the tape.” Patrick said earlier this week.
Wrong. The important question is, why did so many CenterPoint powerlines and poles snap so easily? Why wasn’t the grid built stronger, and why wasn’t vegetation cut away? These are CenterPoint’s primary responsibilities for which they receive a guaranteed profit from customer bills, and they didn’t fulfill them.
CenterPoint officials have stammered their responses.
“What we've seen now is more impact than what we originally thought that we were going to see,” Alyssia Oshodi, CenterPoint Director of Communications, told KHOU television.
CenterPoint had plenty of warnings. So is the problem shoddy maintenance work by CenterPoint subcontractors after the company trimmed 700 employees since 2020 to boost profits? Did the company cheap out on materials and engineering standards? Does the company believe blacking out 85% of its customers in a category 1 hurricane is acceptable?
Is the PUC allowing CenterPoint and other corporations to put profits ahead of people?
I suspect the answer is yes to all of these questions because that’s what happens when one political party runs the show for 26 years. Politicians get lazy when they think voters won’t hold them accountable. Incumbents prioritize making powerful corporations happy, a problem true of all political parties.
Investigative journalists are digging, but only someone with subpoena power can get to the emails, memos and data inside CenterPoint headquarters in Houston.
An attentive attorney general would have already sent a letter demanding the company preserve records. But Texas’s top law enforcement officer, Ken Paxton, is too busy sending fundraising emails promising vengeance on his enemies.
Following the 2021 blackouts, Gov. Greg Abbott promised an investigation and corrective action to fix the state’s primary electric grid. He proclaimed the problem solved that summer. Yet, within weeks, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas began declaring a series of emergencies, warning of possible blackouts. The grid is still broken.
Patrick and Paxton promised to investigate why the energy system failed during Winter Storm Uri. Those inquiries have yet to yield results, with lawmakers too busy defending oil and gas campaign donors who pocketed tens of billions of dollars in profit from Texans’ suffering.
Texas Republicans have bragged about the state’s low taxes, low regulations and pro-business environment since 1999, when they took control of every elected statewide office. They promised a deregulated electricity grid would produce inexpensive and reliable power, and it did for a while.
However, decades of underinvestment and a refusal to prepare for a harsher climate have left Texans vulnerable. Our current leaders are more interested in covering up their neglect than acknowledging the truth.
In addition, I'm seeing reports that many out of town linemen have arrived and are ready to go to work except Centerpoint is blocking them because they want to negotiate pay, nitpick accommodation reimbursements etc.