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06/27/2025
Texas leaders broke promises to hold CenterPoint accountable after Hurricane Beryl. Here are 5 takeaways.
Houston Chronicle | Claire Hao, Neena Satija | June 26, 2025
As Houstonians sweated through days of power outages in the wake of Hurricane Beryl last year, one culprit emerged: CenterPoint Energy, the region’s primary electric utility.
Unable to get updates on when the power would return from CenterPoint, many residents were forced to consult Whataburger’s app instead. Adding to the outrage, the Houston Chronicle revealed that the company had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on massive generators, which turned out to be useless during Beryl.
Texas’ most powerful leaders, including Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, promised that sweeping reforms were coming. But a year later, not much has changed, the Chronicle found.
Here are five key takeaways from our latest investigation.
Texas lawmakers promised a $480 million generator refund for customers. That isn’t happening.
In the months after Beryl, Patrick and state lawmakers repeatedly vowed that CenterPoint alone would absorb the cost of its idle generators. They promised that state regulators would “claw back” the $480 million the utility said it’s already received approval to charge for the units.
But lawmakers ultimately decided not to give state regulators the authority to order such refunds. The senator who authored that bill said the agency no longer needed that ability, because CenterPoint had found other ways to “make customers whole.”
That’s not the case, the Chronicle found. Documents show the utility is double-counting an unrelated $235 million rate decrease as part of its generator refund package. State regulators and city representatives said that consumers were entitled to this rate decrease before Beryl even happened.
Texas leaders insist customers are being made whole. But they’re taking CenterPoint’s word for it.
CenterPoint is also counting two other items as part of its rate relief package. It delayed two rate hikes, saving customers $89 million, the company says. And the utility promised it won’t charge consumers for $165 million in storm costs related to the May derecho and Beryl.
But these costs are difficult to verify. CenterPoint’s figures to lawmakers, its shareholders and the media keep changing. And few details about these costs have been filed with state regulators because officials aren’t ordering the refunds, so they’re not scrutinizing CenterPoint’s claims.
“We’re just taking their word for it,” a former city of Houston lobbyist said.
State officials said ratepayers shouldn’t bear the brunt of CenterPoint’s storm costs. But storm charges have continued.
Some Texas lawmakers suggested last year that CenterPoint shouldn’t be allowed to charge customers for its Beryl-related costs — as the company is usually able to do after big storms — because of the extent of its failures. The chairman of the state agency regulating utilities also wanted to have shareholders bear more risk for storms.
Yet, state regulators recently granted CenterPoint permission to charge consumers $400 million for the May derecho.
The company is now asking regulators to charge ratepayers another $1.3 billion for Beryl, Hurricane Francine and the January snowstorm — even though the latter two storms had little to no impact on its electrical infrastructure.
Texas leaders promised sweeping reforms to how utilities are regulated. Little has changed.
Texas lawmakers also vowed to fundamentally change how CenterPoint and its peers are regulated.
For the most part, electric delivery companies are rewarded based on how much they spend on new equipment and how much they cut down on maintenance. State lawmakers and regulators promised to reform that structure, so these utilities would be incentivized to reduce the severity of their power outages.
This year, state leaders addressed certain issues that arose during Beryl, such as CenterPoint’s lack of a functional outage tracker and how regulators approve generator leases. New statewide standards for replacing utility poles were also adopted.
Yet, the root cause of those issues — the perverse incentives that ratepayer advocates have long complained about — remains largely unfixed.
CenterPoint will still make near-guaranteed profits
CenterPoint says customers won’t pay any more money for the generators than they already have, because it is donating that equipment to the state power grid operator for two years.
But the donation won’t be a hit to the utility’s bottom line: Company executives say they will be able to “more than make up” the cost of that donation by subleasing those units afterwards.
Meanwhile, CenterPoint recently agreed to spend $3.2 billion to shore up its electrical infrastructure in a settlement with cities that is still pending approval from state regulators.
The company can earn a profit on most of those expenses — meaning the utility and its shareholders could make hundreds of millions from that plan in the years to come.
