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CenterPoint CEO apologizes for long Houston outages caused by Hurricane Beryl

The power line company was called before the Public Utility Commission to explain the slow response to outages.

AUSTIN – The head of the power line company CenterPoint Energy publicly apologized Thursday to power grid regulators for failures in responding to Houston-area outages caused by Hurricane Beryl.

Jason Wells, CenterPoint CEO, said he took “personal accountability” for the extended power outages that saw hundreds of thousands of customers without power for days amid sweltering heat in the coastal region. At least 27 people died because of the hurricane, with many deaths attributed to heat.

“I want to apologize to our customers for the frustration we caused,” Wells said. “We will do better.”

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“While we cannot erase the frustrations or difficulties so many of our customers endured, I, and my entire leadership team, will not make excuses,” he added. “We will improve and act with a sense of urgency.”

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CenterPoint has faced the brunt of the blowback in the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl, which made landfall July 8 as a Category 1 storm and hit the Houston area with 6 to 8 inches of rain and sustained winds of 80 mph. It was the first hurricane to hit Houston since Hurricane Harvey in 2017.

At its height, about 2.26 million CenterPoint customers were without power. The company restored power to 1 million customers within 48 hours, but power outages lingered for days for thousands. The Perryman Group economics firm estimated the storm caused $4.6 billion in damage.

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CenterPoint owns and maintains power transmission and distribution lines in the Houston area. Like Oncor in Dallas-Fort Worth, it is a government-approved monopoly with a guaranteed revenue stream that makes up a significant component of electricity bills.

The company and Wells have faced withering criticism in the weeks since Beryl. Gov. Greg Abbott ordered electric regulators at the Public Utility Commission to investigate CenterPoint, which led to Wells and other officials addressing the commission Thursday in Austin.

Speaking during a public comment period, Houston Independent School District Board trustee Savant Moore read the names of 24 people killed by Hurricane Beryl and asked that CenterPoint “show us the same respect they give their shareholders.”

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“While CEO of CenterPoint and the VP of utilities went a few hours to two days without power, my community suffered nine to 14 days,” Moore said. “Some in Northeast Houston still do not have power.”

CenterPoint’s website indicated that about 2,400 customers were without power Thursday afternoon. It was unclear if those outages were related to Beryl.

CenterPoint officials outlined their strategy to address future emergencies, including ways to improve communication. During the storm, the company’s power outage map failed, leaving the state’s most populous city and its emergency officials without a crucial tool to track damage.

Houston emergency officials scrambled to create their own outage map, the Houston Chronicle reported Wednesday, and some residents turned to a Whataburger restaurant location map to discern where the lights and air conditioning might be on in their community.

CenterPoint’s outage tracker failed because it could not keep up with web traffic, said Tony Gardner, CenterPoint’s chief customer officer.

“It was a physical server-based system, which simply could not handle the traffic during elevated storm-level events,” he told the utility commission.

The company will have a new outage tracker available by Aug. 1. Gardner also outlined a new communications strategy that would include daily briefings during significant outage events.

CenterPoint emerged from Thursday’s hearing with a pending $2.2 billion resiliency plan intact, despite some calls for the company to withdraw the request. The company is asking for costs to harden its wires system and other maintenance activities to be passed along to ratepayers.

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In Beryl’s aftermath, community organizations, PUC staff and CenterPoint itself have asked the Public Utility Commission to postpone the application. No action was taken Thursday, but the company stopped short of withdrawing its application — something Commissioner Lori Cobos said she had expected to allow time to complete investigations into the company’s emergency response.

She said it would be a disservice to conduct administrative hearings on CenterPoint’s resiliency plan before lawmakers and commissioners have a chance to weigh in.

North Texas’ electric distribution and transmission provider Oncor has asked the commission to approve a $3.4 billion resiliency plan, according to its application. Like CenterPoint, those costs would be passed along to ratepayers.

On Monday, CenterPoint officials will appear before a special state Senate committee formed in the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl. The hearing could be politically fraught for CenterPoint.

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Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who created the committee and criticized the response to Beryl, has said “a freight train” is coming for CenterPoint.