What's happening?
In a joint press conference with Gov. Greg Abbott and the city of Houston, state officials expressed extreme dissatisfaction with the company's overall response, as well as concerns over a lack of communications from CenterPoint officials in the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl.
"[CenterPoint Energy] seems to be just incapable of doing their job," Abbott said during the press conference. "As a result, the state will have to consider whether or not we should be reducing the size of the territorial region to make it smaller so maybe they can do a better job of managing it."
While Gleeson said the investigation process had already been underway, he announced the formal investigation process will begin at the next PUC meeting on July 25 as part of Abbott's directive issued July 14.
"We were already doing this informally," Gleeson said. "We had CenterPoint before us at our last open meeting. ... We formalized that investigation. The main reason to do that is so it can be done publicly. Everyone will get to follow along. We will post on our website. We will give updates during our open meetings."
Houston Mayor John Whitmire advised that although an investigation is underway, individuals should not harass or threaten any CenterPoint employees who are working in the field.
"Lineman are our friends and doing their job, do not threaten them," Whitmire said. "I understand you're angry and mad and frustrated, but let's get through this together, and as the governor has instructed, we will do a complete assessment of all the stakeholders, public and private, and see how we can improve."
Quotes of note
- "CenterPoint has to do better. I cannot urge this enough. I have tried to stress with their executives that CenterPoint has to have a sense of urgency," Gleeson said. "We will bring to the Legislature and the governor more long-term fixes to address these issues that will probably need statutory change."
- "During this storm, it has impacted multiple regions, and there have been literally dozens, if not close to 50 or so power companies involved in this process. This isn't a failure of the entire system. This is an indictment of one company that failed to fulfill this job," Abbott said.
Depending on the findings of the investigation, recommendations may be sent to the Texas Legislature for statutory changes or deadlines may be set for CenterPoint to be compliant.
According to the CenterPoint outage tracker, there are still 191,683 customers without power in the Houston region as of 5 p.m. July 15.
