The power was out at Casa de Snarky for four days after Hurricane Ike, but I got off fairly light. I still have coworkers without power here in Houston.
This brought about a discussion last week at the office. Those of us who were around for Alicia 25 years ago didn't have this much trouble getting the lights turned back on. What's different today? With the electric market deregulated these days, the transmission operator is separate from the retail provider. The transmission operator gets a fixed amount per customer based on consumption regardless of who sells the customer the power. If you're the transmission operator, how do you increase profitability? We surmised that they must be cheaping out the infrastructure.
Looks like we guessed correctly.
According to yesterday's Houston Chronicle:
After Ike, Entergy Texas reported 345 transmission structures damaged or destroyed and 6,500 utility poles lost.
CenterPoint lost 50 to 60 transmission structures and 4,500 utility poles, company officials said.
Most of the felled structures were made of wood, and many were installed decades ago, industry officials and regulators say.
Entergy and other utilities say they usually replace wooden structures with steel or concrete when possible.
But they're replacing wood with wood in many cases as they repair Ike's damage, so as not to slow down the recovery process, Entergy and CenterPoint officials said.
In 2005, after Wilma blew through Florida and Rita blew through Texas and Louisiana, regulators in Florida and Texas both began looking into strengthening their electric infrastructure. Six months after Wilma, Florida took action, enacting rules that took effect in 2006 that require tree-trimming on a three year cycle and inspections every six to eight years.
Texas? Initially they proposed rules to take effect in 2011 that would require all new transmission towers to be made of steel or concrete and removing all trees from within a utility right-of-way to be removed within a year. Substations were to be built above a point that might be under water in a so-called 500 year flood. Structures installed within 10 miles of the coast would need to withstand at least 140 mile an hour winds.
Lobbyists for the electric industry began to chip away at these proposed rules, removing the requirement for steel & concrete construction, scaling back the substation rule to satisfy a 100 yearflood plain, and eliminated the rule for tree removal.
But that wasn't enough for CenterPoint and Entergy's lobbyists (the Chron reports that CenterPoint retains 16 lobbyists and Entergy has 20). Last month, all of these infrastructure improvements were scrapped... 16 days before Ike hit.
Meanwhile, the cost to repair Ike's damage to the electric grid will be passed along to ratepayers, says today's Chronicle.
The consensus among lawmakers and the utilities is that storms like this only happen occasionally, so we should look at losing power like this as a temporary inconvenience. But it really means we're paying more and getting less. We're going to have to pay higher rates to fund bonds that will pay for repairing the grid with the same materials that failed this time. Had anyone at the PUC been paying attention over the years, we could have funded bonds to harden the system and either prevent or reduce the outages that we're dealing with right now. Either way, we're going to pay for it.
Then again, these are the same Republicans who think that having the poor wait until they have to go to the emergency room is smart healthcare policy. It's the same mindset.