Facing criticism over its power line network’s reliability, Oncor is planning to increase its maintenance spending next year, a company spokesman said Thursday.
The budget increase comes three weeks after close to half a million customers lost power when violent thunderstorms hit North Texas.
Last week Texas Public Utility Commissioner Ken Anderson released a report showing Oncor had cut maintenance spending by more than 20 percent since 2005. At a hearing in Austin, company executives disputed that finding but have yet to offer records proving otherwise.
In 2015, Oncor will spend close to $1.2 billion on new equipment and lines, a 7 percent increase over what was originally budgeted. And it will increase its tree trimming budget by 40 percent to more than $30 million.
“None of this was a direct result of [the hearing] last week,” said spokesman Chris Schein. “We have been working on this for a number of months. We identified a couple years ago the trend on reliability was moving.”
Analysis provided by Oncor on Thursday showed the amount of time customers spent without power because of equipment failure and maintenance issues increased more than 30 percent since 2004 to more than 90 minutes a year. The analysis does not include outages caused by weather.
Days-long outages earlier this month and during an ice storm in December have driven customer frustration in some older sections of Dallas. City Council member Phil Kingston, who represents East Dallas, said he had been inundated with phone calls and messages after residents were unable to reach the power company.
Oncor “told me, ‘You’re about to see a whole lot of tree trimming in East Dallas.’ I told them I need more from them in the future or else I’m going to be on the neighbors’ side,” Kingston said Tuesday.
Oncor is a subsidiary of the Dallas power giant Energy Future Holdings. EFH filed for bankruptcy in April. In his report last week, Anderson questioned whether Oncor, which earned $335 million last year, was sending too much money up to its parent company.
“Any notion we’re sending extra dividend to shareholders is untrue,” Schein said.
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