Texas Concludes Investigation into Hurricane Beryl Utility Performance
Image courtesy of NASA Johnson under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic Deed, resized to 700 x 391 pixels.
The Public Utilities Commission of Texas (PUCT) recently concluded its investigation into how the state’s utilities performed during Hurricane Beryl. The 69-page report delved into what went right and what went wrong and offered multiple suggestions for improvement. Let’s take a closer look at the report’s findings.
How the Texas Utilities Performed Before, During, and After Hurricane Beryl
Hurricane Beryl rocked Texas in July 2024 and ultimately left over 2 million customers in the dark. Although the report emphasized lessons learned, it’s clear the state’s utilities performed admirably in certain areas. For example, they generally all have emergency plans in place, and regularly conduct exercises and drills to practice executing their plans. In addition, the physical poles held up extremely well during the storm, and vegetation management practices appear to be sufficient.
Regarding opportunities for improvement, customer communication was cited as a major shortcoming. For example, CenterPoint Energy’s outage map failed, prompting many customers to turn to a fast-food chain’s app for outage information. Additionally, the report noted that some of the smaller utilities were overly reliant on social media posts to communicate with customers, and often did not provide any outage maps or 24-hour customer support.
Key recommendations include mandating that utilities offer 24-hour phone support; implementing a method to measure the accuracy of estimated restoration times; encouraging more pre-planning collaboration across regional stakeholders, government agencies and neighboring utilities; deploying automatic circuit reclosers; and encouraging customers to report vegetation hazards on their property.
In the final analysis, it’s encouraging that the PUCT was not overly critical of utility performance, as this indicates a good foundation of preparedness. That said, any major storm or emergency event will often expose potential process gaps and identify lessons learned. And luckily for the residents of Texas as well as the utility industry as a whole, Texas’ experience during Hurricane Beryl did just that!
