Representative Jacey Jetton

12 hours ago

🚨Long Post 🚨: The Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) regulates CenterPoint Energy and held an open meeting to hear what happened before and during Hurricane Beryl and what will change going forward. You can watch the hearing here: www.adminmonitor.com/tx/puct/open_meeting/20240725/

Quick recap notes from the hearing:

BEFORE THE HURRICANE: CenterPoint began monitoring the storm nine days before landfall. Original forecasts had the storm hitting further south, but CenterPoint still brought in 3,000 mutual assistance crews (MAC)from partner utility companies. As the forecast shifted, more MACs were mobilized but had to wait for the storm to clear before arriving in Houston.

DURING THE HURRICANE AND RESTORATION EFFORTS: Houston took a direct hit from Hurricane Beryl, a Category 1 storm. The eye of the hurricane hit Brazoria, Fort Bend, and NW Harris counties, and the dirty side hit Harris and Montgomery counties. 2.26 million customers lost power. Within 24 hours, 1 million customers were restored. It took nearly two weeks for the remaining customers to be re-energized.

During restoration efforts, 35,000 trees were trimmed or removed, 3,000 poles were replaced, and 8,000+ miles of lines were walked. Recent droughts and hard freezes left a lot of trees and vegetation dead that was blown over during the hard, sustained winds. This contributed to damage that caused the outages.

GOING FORWARD: The PUCT is investigating and will report its findings and consider rule changes by the end of the year. A portal will be created for residents to share their comments. CenterPoint will report back to the PUCT in October and produce an after-action report by October 31.

CenterPoint’s action plan: Since the storm, CenterPoint has doubled its vegetation management team and is targeting 2,000 incremental line miles with higher risk vegetation. They will harden nearly 350 distribution line miles to the latest extreme wind standards. 100% of the remaining pole replacements for 2024 will be replaced with composite poles (approximately 1,000 poles. Leverage AI to accelerate the dispatch of vegetation crews based on damage modeling. They also want to purchase additional, smaller temporary and mobile generation units for critical infrastructure, like water treatment facilities, hospitals, and elder care facilities.

After the storms in May that damaged much of downtown Houston, CenterPoint realized its outage tracker could not handle high traffic volumes and began moving to a cloud-based system. Prior to the storm, it announced that the system would be online on August 1. Unfortunately, Hurricane Beryl hit during this process. The August 1 timeline is still on schedule.

CenterPoint admitted to failing to adequately communicate with customers during the outage and commissioned an independent review of its processes to improve in the future.

We’ll continue to provide updates and weigh in to this issue to help Texas keep the lights on. ... See MoreSee Less

Representative Jacey Jetton

6 days ago

After a horrible debate performance and failed media tour, Biden calls it quits. This creates a scramble on the Democrat side to find anyone capable of stopping the growing tsunami Trump has developed over an outstanding few weeks, topped off by a spectacular national convention. ... See MoreSee Less