Here’s more on this story from our Senior Audience Engagement Producer Angelica Arinze:
After CenterPoint Energy has restored power to over two million Houston-area residents who lost it in the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl, a looming question remains — how can the energy company prevent another catastrophic outage event in the future? While the company has outlined plans to give its electric infrastructure a major upgrade, a Houston Landing analysis raises new doubts about the efficacy of the plan, **Clare Amari** and **Miranda Dunlap** report.
**More money needed:** Skepticism of CenterPoint’s plans largely stems from the size of the company’s proposed investment, which likely will fall billions of dollars short of what’s needed to prevent future outages, according to industry analysts. Over the past five years, CenterPoint spent more than $1 billion on projects similar to those proposed by the company, yet those improvements didn’t stop nearly 80 percent of its customers from losing power during Beryl.
Unless CenterPoint makes even deeper, faster investments than those already proposed, Houston will remain dangerously vulnerable to hurricanes, wind storms and other extreme weather events, the analysis suggests.
**Less promises, more pledges:** In the 900-page “resiliency plan,” the company also largely relied on vague promises of improved service for customers, with no pledge that the plan would dramatically reduce widespread outages from storms. As the company continues to face widespread criticism and an active investigation by the Public Utility Commission of Texas, industry experts are calling on the company to provide more detailed, geographically informed plans for improving its infrastructure.
**State’s liability:** The Public Utilities Commission of Texas will decide whether to approve CenterPoint’s Resiliency Plan in October. In the meantime, Dallas state sen. Nathan Johnson also raises larger questions about the state’s role in allowing CenterPoint’s systems to wither.
Energy_Balance on
Resilience is not rocket silence. Generators, the transmission to substations, and substations should not fail in storms. The transmission between substations should be on concrete or steel poles. Vehicles seem to be magnetically attracted to crash into poles, so protect the poles.
Every utility should have an asset database. That and inspections will tell the utility when to replace wood poles in the neighborhoods. If trees fell on wires, trim the trees!
Every utility will have a detailed log of what failed in a storm that regulators can study to find the root cause of failures and the incidence of each root cause to prioritize prevention of a repeat. If the utility cannot regulate itself with its own data, adults need to step in. The press can also help in the failure analysis and publish the results.
Add: Every utility has an outage management system. From the substation, a handful of feeders radiate like tree branches, from the thick trunk close to the substation to the end of the most remote branches. A utility prioritizes crews to restore the greatest number of customers first, trunk to the end twig which may have 1 – 10 customers. Any utility will also have agreements for other utilities to send trucks with crews to surge repairs. If Houston wants lower rates, they should condemn the depreciated assets of Centerpoint and create a public utility. The borrowing costs can be lower because of the tax treatment of municipal bonds, the executive salaries are lower, and the profit guaranteed to a private utility comes off the top of the rates.
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Here’s more on this story from our Senior Audience Engagement Producer Angelica Arinze:
After CenterPoint Energy has restored power to over two million Houston-area residents who lost it in the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl, a looming question remains — how can the energy company prevent another catastrophic outage event in the future? While the company has outlined plans to give its electric infrastructure a major upgrade, a Houston Landing analysis raises new doubts about the efficacy of the plan, **Clare Amari** and **Miranda Dunlap** report.
**More money needed:** Skepticism of CenterPoint’s plans largely stems from the size of the company’s proposed investment, which likely will fall billions of dollars short of what’s needed to prevent future outages, according to industry analysts. Over the past five years, CenterPoint spent more than $1 billion on projects similar to those proposed by the company, yet those improvements didn’t stop nearly 80 percent of its customers from losing power during Beryl.
Unless CenterPoint makes even deeper, faster investments than those already proposed, Houston will remain dangerously vulnerable to hurricanes, wind storms and other extreme weather events, the analysis suggests.
**Less promises, more pledges:** In the 900-page “resiliency plan,” the company also largely relied on vague promises of improved service for customers, with no pledge that the plan would dramatically reduce widespread outages from storms. As the company continues to face widespread criticism and an active investigation by the Public Utility Commission of Texas, industry experts are calling on the company to provide more detailed, geographically informed plans for improving its infrastructure.
**State’s liability:** The Public Utilities Commission of Texas will decide whether to approve CenterPoint’s Resiliency Plan in October. In the meantime, Dallas state sen. Nathan Johnson also raises larger questions about the state’s role in allowing CenterPoint’s systems to wither.
Resilience is not rocket silence. Generators, the transmission to substations, and substations should not fail in storms. The transmission between substations should be on concrete or steel poles. Vehicles seem to be magnetically attracted to crash into poles, so protect the poles.
Every utility should have an asset database. That and inspections will tell the utility when to replace wood poles in the neighborhoods. If trees fell on wires, trim the trees!
Every utility will have a detailed log of what failed in a storm that regulators can study to find the root cause of failures and the incidence of each root cause to prioritize prevention of a repeat. If the utility cannot regulate itself with its own data, adults need to step in. The press can also help in the failure analysis and publish the results.
Add: Every utility has an outage management system. From the substation, a handful of feeders radiate like tree branches, from the thick trunk close to the substation to the end of the most remote branches. A utility prioritizes crews to restore the greatest number of customers first, trunk to the end twig which may have 1 – 10 customers. Any utility will also have agreements for other utilities to send trucks with crews to surge repairs. If Houston wants lower rates, they should condemn the depreciated assets of Centerpoint and create a public utility. The borrowing costs can be lower because of the tax treatment of municipal bonds, the executive salaries are lower, and the profit guaranteed to a private utility comes off the top of the rates.