In a heated legislative hearing, Texas state senators grilled CenterPoint Energy CEO Jason Wells over the utility’s inadequate response and communication issues during Hurricane Beryl and its controversial $800 million investment in temporary mobile generators not used during the storm.
At the peak of Beryl, around 2.7 million individuals lost power. While CenterPoint claimed to have restored power to about 2 million shortly after the hurricane subsided, hundreds of thousands of Houston-area residents remained without power a week later.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick subsequently appointed a 13-member special committee to study, in part, the preparedness of electric providers—namely CenterPoint—a point emphasized by State Sen. Charles Schwertner, who chairs the committee.
“I think it will be demonstrated today the seriousness with which the state acted in anticipation of this hurricane, in contrast to the multitude of failures of CenterPoint that have been highlighted in the media and felt by millions of Texans,” said Schwertner.
State Sen. Paul Bettencourt did not mince words in conveying his frustration with the energy giant, at the beginning of the hearing.
“What makes my blood boil is the fact that we’re having to have a hearing to hear about a whole bunch of people that did their job right. But the biggest multibillion-dollar corporation, we’re having to tell them how to do their job,” said Bettencourt.
The frustration was bipartisan, with Democrat State Sen. Borris Miles stating, “I’m not happy to be here today because, colleagues, it seems like déjà vu all over again. The human error could have been prevented. And we could have saved the most precious resources of Texas: Texans.”
CenterPoint CEO Jason Wells began his remarks with an apology.
“Our response to the impacts of Hurricane Beryl and our communications were not acceptable. They did not meet our expectations [or] those of our customers. And I take personal accountability for that. I want to apologize to our customers, our state, and their families for the frustrations they experienced during Hurricane Beryl and the restoration process,” said Wells.
Much of the frustration from senators revolved around the $800 million spent by CenterPoint and backed by ratepayers on mobile generation units, with skepticism about whether the expense was cost-effective or necessary.
“I’m really shocked that CenterPoint now or then would have thought that almost $800 million for two units that would rarely be used would be a reasonable and necessary cost,” said State Sen. Phil King.
Senators also questioned CenterPoint’s use of an inaccurate outage tracker that misled consumers on the nature of the problem in the days after the storm.
Sen. Bettencourt called it “probably the single, quite frankly, most double dumbass decision I’ve ever seen a major corporation make in your business.”
“I’m astonished that it would go down without a replacement being in process. And if you already knew it was limited by bandwidth or by application, why wasn’t [this] handled in the offseason?” he questioned.
“It’s inexcusable that it wasn’t ready for our customers during Hurricane Beryl,” Wells replied, adding a new version of the tracker will go live by Thursday, August 1.
The hearing comes one day after the Houston Chronicle reported that Lynnae Wilson, who served as CenterPoint’s senior vice president of electric business, was no longer employed by the company. When asked about Wilson’s departure, Wells said it was the company’s policy not to comment on personnel decisions.
Despite calls to resign, Wells told committee members he wanted to stay on to continue “momentum.”
