Hurricane Beryl likely inflicted between $1.2 billion and $1.3 billion in damages to Houston Electric infrastructure earlier this month, executives of parent company CenterPoint Energy Inc. said July 30.
Those costs are on top of roughly $450 million in damages from a derecho that hit Houston in mid-May and at one point knocked out service to nearly 1 million people. Beryl’s landfall on July 8 ended up causing outages to nearly 2.3 million people at its peak and led to 15,000 CenterPoint and mutual assistance workers replacing more than 3,000 distribution poles and trimming or removing about 35,000 trees during the restoration process.
Speaking to analysts after he and CEO Jason Wells reported CenterPoint’s second-quarter results—net income of $228 million compared to $106 million in the same period of last year—CFO Chris Foster said the company plans to securitize between $1.5 billion and $1.7 billion of the two weather events’ expected costs late this year as permitted under Texas regulations. The company’s preliminary cost estimates would add a little more than 2% to the average Houston Electric residential bill over 15 years.
Residents and government leaders leveled sharp criticism at Wells, Foster and their team in the wake of the storm hitting. The company’s communications efforts, including an outage tracker that has been down since May’s storms, were particularly derided. Wells said a new tracker, with higher capacity, will go live later this week and that he plans to hire “a seasoned emergency response leader” to oversee CenterPoint’s partnerships with government agencies and community groups.
Those efforts, Wells and Foster said, will be incorporated into active talks about a Houston Electric rate case settlement. On a similar note, the executives said they have withdrawn their existing system resiliency plan filing and expect to file a revised plan early next year that will, among other things, expand vegetation management work that already is well above Houston Electric’s historical baseline.
