Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has formed a special committee in the Texas Senate to review electrical companies’ preparedness and responses to Hurricane Beryl.
In a Wednesday press release, Patrick revealed that State Sen. Charles Schwertner (R-Georgetown) will chair the committee investigating the delayed response of some electric utility giants in Southeast Texas.
“Texans are rightfully upset with the overwhelming failure of electric utility companies to restore power in a timely fashion following Hurricane Beryl,” stated Patrick. “The electric utility companies’ failure cannot be tolerated, especially when it was so obvious a storm was headed toward Texas.”
“The Texas Senate will work to ensure electric utility companies respond more effectively to future storms,” he added.
In addition to Schwertner, the committee will include State Sen. Phil King (R-Weatherford) as vice chairman and State Sens. Carol Alvarado (D-Houston), Paul Bettencourt (R-Houston), Brandon Creighton (R-Conroe), Juan Hinojosa (D-McAllen), Joan Huffman (R-Houston), Lois Kolkhorst (R-Brenham), Morgan LaMantia (D-Palm Valley), Mayes Middleton (R-Galveston), Borris Miles (D-Houston), Robert Nichols (R-Jacksonville), and Judith Zaffirini (D-Laredo).
News of the committee comes the same week Gov. Greg Abbott revealed that he ordered the Public Utilities Commission “to undertake a rigorous study” on whether one of the region’s biggest electricity providers, CenterPoint, cut corners in its preparedness before Beryl to increase its profit.
Abbott also ordered a broader PUC study into all electricity providers in the region on July 14.
“Texas utilities bear the responsibility of ensuring system resiliency in their respective service territories,” argued Abbott. “While weather-related disasters are outside of human control, their impact to our daily lives can be mitigated or alleviated if proper system planning and pre-storm preparations are made.”
At the peak of Beryl, around 2.7 million individuals lost power. While CenterPoint claimed that it restored power to around 2 million shortly after the hurricane subsided, hundreds of thousands of Houston-area residents were still without power a week later.
Though the Beryl outages were a distribution issue rather than a generation issue, warnings of problems with the state electrical grid were not unanticipated going into the summer.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which operates Texas’ unique independent grid that covers most of the state, alerted citizens in late April that it was prepared to cancel planned outages to shore up supplies for two days to meet demand.
A majority of Texans later responded in a poll conducted by the University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Politics Project that it was very likely or somewhat likely the state would suffer from a grid failure this summer.
All facets of Texas’ energy generation and distribution will likely be scrutinized during the next legislative session, which begins in January.
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