On Monday, the Senate Special Committee on Hurricane and Tropical Storm Preparedness, Recovery, and Electricity met. After 11 hours of testimony it was clear:
CenterPoint and its leadership failed us. The day the hurricane hit they claimed they were “ready.” That couldn’t be further from the truth. In a bombshell statement, the CEO of CenterPoint, Jason Wells, said he never bothered to call acting Governor Patrick or Texas Department of Emergency Management Director before the storm hit.
Customers were left in the dark without a working outage tracker and no estimated time of restoration. The $800 million spent on “mobile” generation (that every ratepayer pays for monthly at a 9.5% profit to CenterPoint) was nowhere to be found, vegetation management was inadequate before the storm, and leadership failed in getting enough linemen out for emergency restoration. Even though the actions and preparation of CenterPoint’s management failed, they will continue to charge ratepayers even more for the cost of their mistakes. This is unacceptable. You also have to ask what’s the point of smart meters if they can’t alert us which meters are on and which critical facilities don’t have power. Only 42% of customers receive power outage updates through CenterPoint’s system. When I asked the CenterPoint CEO if they attempted to get customer contact information for the other 58%, he lied and said he asked for the information and never received it.
Finally, the CEO of CenterPoint was asked if they were too big of a company to adequately respond to customer needs, and he couldn’t answer the question. If that’s the case, then the answer is yes. Perhaps it is time to break up their monopoly to provide more reliable service to our community who expect, and pay for, the lights to be on. Even though it’s CenterPoint today, it could be a different utility tomorrow. This is why changes must be made for every utility to incentivize performance over profit.
Sincerely,
Mayes Middleton
Texas State Senator
