Texas governor criticizes Houston energy as utility says power will be restored by Wednesday

AUSTIN, Texas — Most of Houston’s power outages after Hurricane Beryl should be resolved within the next two days, the city’s main utility said Monday, while Texas Gov. Greg Abbott threatened to punish CenterPoint Energy even after the lights were back on.

The Texas Public Utility Commission, the state’s regulator, announced Monday that it had launched an investigation, demanding Abbott, into CenterPoint’s storm preparation and response, as hundreds of thousands of residents were left without power for more than a week after the storm. The governor has given the utility until the end of July to submit plans to protect the power supply through the rest of what could be an active hurricane seasonand pruning trees and vegetation that threaten the power lines.

But some energy experts question whether Abbott and Texas regulators, whose leaders are appointed by the governor, have done enough so far to crack down on utilities or make power lines in the nation’s largest energy-producing state more resilient.

“What CenterPoint is showing us by repeatedly not delivering power is that they just don’t seem to be able to do their job,” Abbott said Monday in Houston.

Spokespeople for CenterPoint, which has defended the response and pace of recovery from the outages, did not immediately respond to an email request for comment Monday.

A week after Beryl made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane, downing power lines, uprooting trees and knocking branches onto electrical lines, the resilience of Texas’ power grid has again come under fire amid storm damage and prolonged power outages.

In 2021, a winter storm plunged the state into a freeze, leaving millions of residents without power and pushing Texas’s electrical grid to the brink of total collapse. After the deadly blackouts, Abbott and state lawmakers promised changes that would keep Texans from being left in the dark in dangerous cold and heat.

Unlike that crisis — which was caused by failed electricity generation — Beryl brought high winds that downed power lines and caused power outages to about 2.7 million homes and businesses. Most were concentrated in the Houston area, where CenterPoint reported Monday that it had restored power to more than 2 million customers. Still, more than 200,000 remained without current.

Residents of the Houston area have struggled in the heat and humidity, standing in long lines for gas, food and water, and going to community centers to find air conditioning. Hospitals have a peak seen in patients with heat-related illnesses and carbon monoxide poisoning caused by improper use of home generators.

“This is not a failure of the entire system,” Abbott said. “This is an indictment of a company that has failed to do its job.”

At a special meeting of the Houston City Council on Monday, resident Alin Boswell said he had been without power for eight days and had not seen anyone from CenterPoint in his neighborhood until that morning. He said the city and the company should have been aware of the potential damage after storms in May knocked out power to more than 1 million people.

“You and CenterPoint had a taste of this failure back in May,” Boswell told council members.

Ed Hirs, an energy fellow at the University of Houston, said the shortcomings extend beyond CenterPoint. He said regulators have been reluctant to ensure that transmission lines are more resilient and trees are adequately pruned.

Hirs said Abbott and other leaders who have focused solely on the utility after Beryl are looking for a scapegoat.

“Of course, none of them have a mirror nearby,” he said. “It’s not just CenterPoint. The regulatory pact has completely collapsed.”

CenterPoint has at least 10 years of vegetation management reports on file with Texas regulators. In April, the company filed a 900-page report detailing long-term plans and spending it would need to make the energy system more resilient, from pruning trees to weathering storms and floods to cyberattacks.

In a report filed May 1, CenterPoint said it had spent nearly $35 million on tree removal and pruning in 2023. It said it would focus efforts this year on more than 3,500 miles (5,630 kilometers) of the estimated 29,000 miles (46,670 kilometers) of overhead power lines in 2024.

Vegetation management remains a key issue for preventing another power outage when the next storm hits, said Michael Webber, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Texas who focuses on clean energy technology. But it’s just one ongoing issue for energy providers.

Policymakers must rebuild Texas’ energy grid to adapt to a changing climate, Webber said.

“We designed our system for the weather of the past,” he said.

The utility has defended its preparation for the storm, saying it brought in about 12,000 additional workers from outside Houston. It has said it would have been unsafe to place those workers in the predicted storm impact area before Beryl made landfall.

In a message to CenterPoint customers Sunday evening, CEO Jason Wells wrote that the company had made “remarkable” progress.

“The rapid pace of restoration is a testament to our preparation and the investments we have made in the system,” Wells wrote.

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Lathan, who reported from Austin, Texas, is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-reported issues.