Reading Picks - Hurricane Beryl & CenterPoint Edition

A curated rundown of the articles about the last week

Today’s Picks focuses on the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl and the systemic grid weaknesses that are so evident right now. We know everyone wants answers as to how this happened and at the Texas Energy and Power Newsletter, we’ll cover it all.

As you know as a reader of this newsletter (thank you!), these issues aren’t new.

In February 2023, I wrote Local Outages Are Still Outages. At that time, nearly a million Texans were without power, most of them Austin Energy customers following an ice storm. I wrote then that all parts of Texas’ grid are problematic. I even cited CenterPoint as one of the biggest offenders then, almost 18 months ago.

Here’s what I wrote on February 2, 2023:

These outages are on the local distribution grid but that doesn’t mean policymakers, regulators, energy companies, and Texans are powerless to reduce their severity.

During his press conference yesterday, Governor Abbott said: “It’s important to remember that local outages are not a reason to say there is a problem with the power grid.” I know what he probably means and I hear this from people all the time, but it’s wrong. He likely means there aren’t problems at the transmission level, also called the bulk power grid, or the ERCOT grid. But the distribution level grid is still part of the grid. Local outages are still outages.

While extreme weather that causes outages is inevitable, it’s not inevitable that people have to be without power. We can ensure people have onsite power and we can reduce the frequency, the duration, and the severity of outages with smart policymaking. 

What I wrote about as a core solution then, remains a core solution today: microgrids and DERs.

The state has made some progress on this front with a few groundbreaking policies and initiatives, namely the Aggregated Distributed Energy Resource pilot and the Texas Power Promise. But the former is tiny (capped at 80 megawatts statewide or one-tenth of one percent of peak demand) and the latter, as I wrote about last week, hasn’t been implemented despite a $900 million appropriation that passed 13 months ago. I talked with Senator Nathan Johnson about the Texas Power Promise earlier this year.

In coming weeks, we’ll also look much closer at CenterPoint’s resiliency plan. In a Grid Roundup published on April 30, I wrote:

The plan’s lack of focus on customer-sited resiliency (weatherization of homes and buildings, addition of distributed energy resources, etc.) which increases resilience and lowers costs, needs to be addressed. 

This is likely to be a flaw in all of the utilities’ system resiliency plans, not just CenterPoint’s.

And finally, I interviewed Jason Ryan, Executive Vice President of CenterPoint, for the podcast back in February and we talked about resilience planning — and what resilience even means. We also talked about microgrids, DERs, and Virtual Power Plants and the utility’s role in helping customers to be more resilient.

Again, more to come on this soon. But for now, please check out these articles and podcasts and these articles from the past week: