TXU Energy, the retail electricity business of TXU Corp., announced at the end of September that it would expand its hurricane relief efforts by increasing its monetary donations to hurricane victims to $1 million.

TXU Energy had pledged $150,000 to the Dallas Mayor's Hurricane Relief Fund for victims of Hurricane Katrina to help provide housing support and utility assistance. Then on Sept. 27, TXU Energy added $850,000 to assist TXU Energy customers across the state who had been affected by the storms. This $1 million of funding was in addition to the $15 million over three years that TXU Energy has committed to its TXU Energy Aid program to assist customers with temporary bill payment assistance.

TXU Energy continued working with social service agencies and with other cities to determine appropriate ways to offer assistance moving forward.

"TXU Energy is 100 percent committed to helping our customers who need assistance after such a catastrophe," said TXU Energy Chairman and CEO Jim Burke. "We will continue to work with the social service agencies, cities and our customers to facilitate recovery efforts."

With the addition of more than 300 extra employee volunteers, TXU Energy handled almost 86,000 power outage calls during and following Hurricane Rita.

On average, these calls were answered in under one minute, which is faster and more efficient than at any time during the past three major storms. In addition TXU Energy employees and volunteer employees placed more than 10,000 outbound calls to reach both residential and business customers to check on the status of their outages and to proactively reach critical care customers, such as police departments and hospitals, to inform them of estimated restoration times received from the local utility.