CenterPoint Defends Response, But Questions Continue

The Houston Chronicle has an interesting duet of information this week. On one hand, they scored the first interview with CenterPoint CEO Jason Wells since Hurricane Beryl left 2.2 million people in the Houston area without power where Wells defends and celebrates the response from his company. On the other is a scathing column by Chris Tomlinson laying out the complex levels of failures CenterPoint has had across the last several severe storms. Sadly for the people sweltering without power for over 96 hours, the latter makes the former look less sincere.

“I understand how frustrating it is to be without power, especially in this heat. I understand what a difficult situation this is for our customers, but I am proud of the progress we have made,” Wells said. “Restoring 1.1 million customers within effectively 48 hours of the storm’s passing is faster than what many of our peers have seen in the past 10 named storms.”

This is true in a sense. A careful watch of the CenterPoint outage tracker did show steady gains on affected customer areas starting roughly 4 p.m. on Monday within hours of the storm’s passing. There is no doubt that CenterPoint was in fact working hard to restore the lights.

However, it’s harder to square that with some of the company’s other statements. Regular releases and tweets from CenterPoint claimed that crews were working around the clock, but there was little movement in their official numbers between nightfall and sunrise for those huddled in the dark checking the page for hopeful news.

Pictures of crews at work may have been designed to boost morale and gain sympathy for the line workers in the field. That is poisoned by recent rumors and social media posts from people claiming to be contractors that actual movement from these thousands of borrowed hands was stalled over pay negotiations. The fact that a map showing restoration progress took days to put together, leaving people to rely on the Whataburger app instead, further pushed the feeling of corporate neglect and general incompetence.

As Tomlinson points out, CenterPoint is a $19 billion-a-year company with a monopoly on delivering power that goes back to before there were fifty stars on the flag. Wells brags about adding $2 billion in improvements annually, but that seems a paltry sum considering the size of CenterPoint and the magnitude of responsibility they have to the people of Texas.

Where do the other billions go? Well, CenterPoint has cut 700 employees since 2020 because it makes the company look more profitable to shareholders even though it also reduces the ability of the company to do their actual job. As climate change drives storms to be more numerous and severe, a company like CenterPoint should be hiring, not firing.

This is unlikely to happen. Texas’s regulatory agencies, ERCOT and PUC, have little incentive to force the power industry (from which most of their membership comes from) to better themselves and even less ability to do so.

Wells may acknowledge this need. He said:

“We have been making these investments, and I do feel the system operated as designed. We built our transmission structures to withstand extreme winds, and we had minimal damage to the transmission system. … Strategically, we need to start by investing in the backbone of the system. If you can’t get power into the local area, then you can’t get power to people.”

A stirring sentiment not backed up by CenterPoint’s behavior over the last several years. Shareholders don’t put power lines back up, and they seem to be the customers CenterPoint wants to spend the most money on.