| In Houston the problems appear to be due to deregulation of the previous HL&P monopoly. If you saw it happen, it was a slow-motion dumpster fire. I could say a lot more about that later, but the dereg process took so long and was so transparent about what was going to happen (over the course of multiple terms of elected officials and lobbyists), that the split-up into separate corporations was completely gamed before it ever went into effect. In hindsight you would have to say that the entire purpose of deregulation here was to make it possible to extract more wealth from the same assets and ratepayers than it ever would have been legal before. Carla was a disaster in the 1960's and by the late '70's the monopoly was still trimming trees and hauling away megatons of branches like nobody has ever seen in recent years. Protecting one of their most valuable assets, the distribution lines themselves. The Texas Public Utility Commission functionally required the power companies to work in favor of the citizens in a way that was completely lost after dereg. That's when the lines were spun off into a corporation known as Centerpoint, virtually gifted assets to them from the public good, for them to operate as a post-monopoly middleman. The generator companies and wholesalers are upstream, and the retailers are who ratepayers interact with so it's not designed to be only one middleman. Even though there's now "competition" that did not exist previously. Centerpoint just transmits the power, so the ratepayer and generator regulations don't apply to the corporation that owns the transmission assets since dereg. Centerpoint says Beryl is the worst storm they have endured, well Alicia was a direct hit but that was before Centerpoint existed. Yes the bulk of the assets were in lots better shape back then, they were regulated like a single-point-of-failure common-good monopoly should be. |