From Houston Public Media:
CenterPoint Energy has begun holding open houses to try to repair relations with Houston-area customers following Hurricane Beryl. The latest took place at the Metropolitan Multi-Service Center on Houston’s West Gray Street on Saturday. The prevailing mood of ratepayers was dissatisfaction and often anger.
A clutch of elderly residents gathered around a CenterPoint executive in a polo shirt. He spoke with them calmly, and they seemed to listen. Then, a pair of CenterPoint volunteers helped two of the residents sit by a table, where they prepared to fill out comment cards. What they heard left them far from satisfied.
“Some of my relatives had to clean my deep freeze out, clean my refrigerator out. My house was so hot, I was about to pass out,” said Vada Roberts, a resident of the Northwood Manor community in Northeast Houston.
Roberts sat connected to a mobile oxygen tank, which she carried with her in a bag. “I had to get out of there,” she said, “and I had just gotten out of the hospital from having surgery, and I was miserable.”
Roberts said CenterPoint had supposedly put her area, where many seniors live, on a priority list for restoring power. “And they said they was going to keep up with us, let us know, from day to day and how everything was going to be going, whether the lights was going to come back on in a day or was going to come back on in two days, which did not happen,” Roberts said. “And I am very upset. I am very disgusted with CenterPoint because we were…the neglected and the forgotten area.”
Roberts was far from the only one who felt that way. Bill Kelly worked for Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner’s administration for eight years. But on Saturday, he was just a ratepayer.
“(We) lost power for seven days,” Kelly said. “We’re very thankful. My wife and I and our dog, we were able to bunk up with a friend of ours who also lost power but had a generator.”
Kelly said he didn’t see much difference in CenterPoint’s behavior since the storm compared to before it. “My concern,” he said, “is that many of the things that everybody, including state senators and state reps, are concerned about that happened pre-Beryl, at appealing local court decisions with regards to applications, are now happening post-Beryl.”
Kelly said he has watched CenterPoint fight a move by the City of Houston and other local cities to block the company from withdrawing a proposed rate increase. The cities want to force CenterPoint to lower its rates. An administrative review judge ruled against CenterPoint on Thursday. The company then appealed the decision to the Public Utility Commission.
“It’s very disappointing that the first action that CenterPoint took post-Beryl is to appeal another local decision,” Kelly said. “That’s wrong.”
All that is far from the impression CenterPoint’s hoping to create. CEO and president Jason Wells was one of the many company executives at the West Gray Street event. He said one of the biggest concerns he’d heard ratepayers express was about the company’s failure to communicate adequately during and after the storm.
“There was frustration not knowing when their power was going to be restored with Hurricane Beryl,” Wells said, “Was it two days? Was it two weeks? That question of when they could anticipate power coming back on and not having information around it created anxiety.”
Wells said the company will incorporate customers’ feedback as it works to improve its new outage tracker. The company’s decision to take down its previous outage tracker before the storm without installing a replacement was one of customers’ major sources of grief during and after Beryl.
CenterPoint expects to wrap up the first phase of responding to the damage from Beryl by the end of the week.
“As that gets completed, we’re now going to roll out phase 2. Phase 2 will really be kind of a targeted effort between September 1 this year and June 1 next year to address the remainder of this hurricane season, winter storm preparedness, and be ready for the 2025 hurricane season,” Wells said. “And then the third phase, which we will file with the Public Utility Commission in early ’25, will be the three-year plan that will really address the system resiliency investments to mitigate these outages moving forward.”
CenterPoint will hold at least a dozen more open houses across the Greater Houston area between Tuesday, Aug. 27, and the end of September.
“We’ve heard the call to action,” Wells said. “We will be better. We are getting better every day. It’s not ending here with our 40-plus commitments at the end of August. This is a medium and, as I said, long-term plan to build the most resilient coastal grid in the U.S.”
