Two weeks after hundreds of thousands were left without power following a violent thunderstorm in North Texas, the transmission company Oncor is facing criticism from state regulators that it had cut maintenance spending on its power line network.
Each year transmission companies spend tens of millions of dollars trimming trees and replacing old lines and equipment to minimize the loss of electricity when bad weather strikes.
But according to a memo filed Friday by Texas Public Utility Commissioner Ken Anderson, between 2005 and 2013 Oncor cuts its maintenance spending by more than 20 percent, to less than $60 million. Meanwhile, the amount it spent on new equipment to upgrade and expand its distribution system decreased 5 percent, to less than $400 million. And over the same period, its customer total increased 9 percent, to more than 3.2 million across North and West Texas.
At a hearing in Austin on Friday, Oncor executives disputed those findings.
“I haven’t had the chance to fully assess staff’s work. But from an operational standpoint, we’re not diminishing our investment, we’re increasing it,” chief operating officer Jim Greer said.
A financial report that Oncor filed with the PUC does show maintenance spending decreasing. But a company spokesman said Friday that the budget line Anderson was looking at might include other costs that could cause the maintenance figure to inflate or deflate from year to year.
The divergent data is now the subject of meetings between Oncor and the PUC staff.
Anderson defended his findings Friday as based on the company’s own data and expressed skepticism that Oncor was keeping up with other utilities’ efforts to upgrade their distribution systems.
“Oncor asserted that it was committed to the reliability of its feeder lines in a letter sent to the commission on March 23, 2012,” Anderson wrote in his memo. “Recent performance and the historical information … seem to indicate otherwise.”
On Oct. 2, close to 300,000 homes and businesses in the Dallas-Fort Worth area lost power as a thunderstorm swept through. Frustration was exacerbated early in the storm when customers logged on to Oncor’s outage website to find no estimates of when power would be restored.
Two days later, tens of thousands were still without power, generating a flurry of criticism on social media and raising questions about how well-prepared Oncor is to handle inclement weather. A second storm, on Oct. 6, knocked down more lines. More than half a million customers lost power at some point during the two events.
Oncor executives appeared before the PUC on Friday to defend their performance during the storm. Greer said the Oct. 2 storm caused “the most damage I’ve seen in my career,” with tornado-force winds that struck with little warning.
The process of restoring power was slowed by the scale of the storm, which stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to Chicago. Out-of-state crews that Oncor usually relies on for assistance were tied up responding to the storm elsewhere, Greer said.
Utilities have been criticized by customer advocates for becoming too reliant on independent contractors who jump among storms from coast to coast clearing debris.
“People having to wait longer for restoration after a storm has become the norm,” Carol Biedrzycki, executive director of Texas Ratepayers Organization to Save Energy, said in an interview Friday. “It seems that way all over the country.”
The question the PUC is trying to answer now is how diligent utilities are in maintaining their systems.
Traditionally, regulators use the rate-case system to keep tabs on that process. But Anderson said Friday that attention to the issue had faded. He is urging the commission to order its staff to start tracking that spending independently.
In his memo Friday, Anderson contrasted Oncor’s spending with that of the Houston utility CenterPoint. Over the 2005 to 2013 period, CenterPoint increased its maintenance budget by 75 percent, to more than $99 million.
But comparisons between utilities are difficult, said Oncor spokesman Chris Schein. Oncor operates across a sprawling territory of urban and rural areas, with some communities in East and West Texas dependent on a single line that can stretch 80 miles. CenterPoint almost exclusively serves Houston.
“If we could, we would build a grid that never had an outage,” Schein said. “But we have to manage a grid for cost so people can afford it.”
Follow James Osborne on Twitter at @osborneja.
