At the request of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, the state will open an investigation into CenterPoint Energy and any other energy companies in Texas whose customers have lost power due to Hurricane Beryl.
The Texas Public Utilities Commission will handle the investigation.
Mr. Patrick is serving as acting governor while Mr. Abbott is away on a preplanned economic mission to Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea.
More than 2.7 million utility customers were reportedly without power after Hurricane Beryl made landfall in Matagorda County on July 8 and turned north, skirting its outer eye wall on the Houston metro area. Officials said there were more outages than any previous storm.
There were originally about 2.3 million CenterPoint customers without power after the hurricane. The company’s crew of more than 12,000 linemen from various parts of Texas and other states had restored power to 914,000 of those affected by Wednesday afternoon, but they still have a long way to go.
Meanwhile, Texas heat is bearing down on the region, and the National Weather Service continues to issue heat advisories for several of the counties suffering major power outages.
“We understand how difficult it is for our customers to be without power, particularly in this summer heat,” said Lynnae Wilson, senior vice president of electric business for CenterPoint Energy, in a July 11 statement. “Having substantially completed our damage assessment and restoration of customers impacted by circuit related outages, our crews are now focusing on repairing more localized damage, including in the hardest-hit areas.
“We know that our customers are counting on us, and we are committed to working as safely and quickly as we can until every last customer is back on.”
Mr. Patrick said that if CenterPoint meets its goal to have power restored to 2.2 million people by Sunday, that still leaves half a million people going into next week without power. He said it was “not acceptable.”
“I understand they have a tough job,” he said. “We’re going to investigate it. We’re going to get to the bottom of it. We are all going to have big storms in this area. We have lots of trees that hit power lines. That’s going to happen, but we have to be sure that they were prepared as they should have been before.”
Cooling centers have been opened up in the meantime, providing water, ice, and food for those who need it.
Mr. Patrick and Texas’ Emergency Management Chief Nim Kidd said that the power outages have a larger affect on the city besides the heat.
Authorities have issued 160 boil water notices across eight counties, according to Mr. Kidd, due to the fact that 135 wastewater treatment plants are offline.
More than a dozen hospitals are still on internal disaster, and more than 40 dialysis clinics are still having issues.
“Electricity is still the number one issue that we are dealing with right now,” Mr. Kidd said.
And while there are more than 1 million Texans still without power, Mr. Patrick told members of the press that he wants the power companies to stay focused on restoring power.
“Right now, I want every person at CenterPoint to have one job: Get the power back on,” he said. “We'll talk about what happened before the storm later. Just get the power back on.”
Mr. Patrick also called attention to the matter of the Texas power grid, which he said was “a whole different issue” than blackouts because of falling trees.
Addressing the question of why the power lines aren’t buried, the acting governor said it would be “prohibitively expensive,” take decades to complete, and would be difficult to repair.
