| I just got power back late last night (6th day of outage). This comes directly on the heels of a prior power outage that also lasted nearly a week from a severe storm back in May. CNP seems to have majorly dropped the ball on this one from a logistics and disaster preparedness standpoint (especially considering they had a trial run only 2 months ago). Unlike the storm in May, a) Beryl was forecasted to impact Houston at least 24 hrs beforehand, b) its hurricane season so CNP should be ready to go. They routinely seem to lag behind on electrical grid improvements and maintenance. From my personal observations, a lot of outages could have been prevented by better tree management. (Anecdotally, I had a tree catch fire behind my house last year due to limbs contacting lines; I called CNP to report and they did nothing; said to watch it and let it burn out. They haven’t trimmed trees on the line behind my house in the 4 years i’ve lived here). With Beryl, it has become painfully apparent that CNP was simply not logistically prepared to handle the impact of hurricanes, and did not prepare in advance, a major failure for a utility provider operating on the gulf coast. These are not black swan events. Root cause seems to point towards prioritizing shareholder value over providing services, and lack of regulation enabled by Texas laissez-faire handling of utility providers. A short timeline:
In 2014 CNP reported ‘excess revenue’ but were allowed to keep it https://stateimpact.npr.org/texas/2014/10/20/texas-puc-leave.... In 2020 a major activist investor put a large stake in CNP https://www.bizjournals.com/houston/news/2015/12/14/billiona.... The owner of that private equity group also happens to be a major donor to the political party of the current Texas governor, who appoints the commissioners who regulate public utilities (https://theintercept.com/2020/10/15/paul-singer-hedge-fund-r...). Texas electric utilities are regulated in theory, but in practice this regulation seems lax or at least not proactive. This was readily apparent in the 2021 freeze (Uri):
https://www.statesman.com/story/business/2021/10/21/texas-re... And later in 2021 CNP also made direct political donations to Texas politicians: https://www.texastribune.org/2021/08/04/texas-energy-industr.... It doesn’t seem like Texas has done much to improve regulation since the 2021 failure. https://www.tpr.org/environment/2022-11-17/texas-lawmakers-a... https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-southwest/why... It’s hard to see how these apparent conflicts of interest (and lack of regulation or consequences) don’t create an environment where a state supported monopoly can abuse their position by putting short term profits first. |