Comments on CPS Energy, Winter Storm Uri & the CEP Report

After the Winter Storm Uri disaster of February, the Mayor of San Antonio, Ron Nirenberg, appointed a Community Emergency Preparedness (CEP) Committee to evaluate the handling of the storm event by our two publicly-owned utilities, CPS and SAWS, and by the City’s Emergency Operations Center (EOC). This Committee, chaired by former City Councilman (CD8) and former SAWS Board Member Reed Williams, also included current Council Members Rocha-Garcia (CD4), Sandoval (CD7), Pelaez (CD8) and Perry (CD10).

The Committee issued its report Thursday June 24 and also published a webpage of committee questions and responses. There are a number of important findings, and here I focus on CPS. They received the most detailed questions from the CEP, and their failures had major secondary impacts on EOC and SAWS, exacerbating an already very difficult situation for San Antonio residents and businesses.

The Report makes very clear major failures at the level of State Government, failures that were left largely uncorrected by the recent Legislature. I conclude:
1. The simplest, most reliable and cheapest way to enhance our grid resiliency is to connect to other grids! This is anathema to our anti-American Republican state leaders. However, in a time of crisis such as Uri, energy could have reached our citizens and prevented hundreds of deaths, thousands of freezing pipes, home disasters etc. It is unconscionable that our leaders failed to take this action, as lone Republican with sense Lyle Larson has pointed out. With national grid connections ERCOT would not have needed massive load shedding to avert total grid collapse.
2. The previous disaster of 2011 provided fair warning of this year’s possible failures, but the State failed to take meaningful action then and most companies chose to forego or minimize winterization expenses. State Representative Larson acknowledged this in an Express News statement.
3. Inter-grid connections could greatly enhance growth and profitability in Texas renewable energy resources. Our renewable resources are often so abundant within the state that they are sold at prices near zero. If those energy supplies could reach the East or West regional grids they could bring revenue into Texas and support further renewable energy here, good for the economy and good for the climate.
4. The ERCOT market was sabotaged by price fixing by the Texas Public Utility Commission (PUCT) which artificially fixed prices extremely high for several days. There was no need for this because it had no effect on energy supply since the supply problem related to production that could not be increased because of non-price related failures.
CPS failures in this crisis were massive and historic:
1. Two huge portions of CPS Energy production--so called base load resources (i.e. dependable in all situations!) failed catastrophically. The older Spruce 1 coal plant energy production dropped from 100% to 1% by 2/15/2021, and did not recover past 40% capacity until after the crisis ended on 2/19. The South Texas Nuclear Plant (STP), of which CPS is part owner and manager, had a water pressure sensor line freeze, resulting in multi-day shut down of STP 1.
  These two failures cost CPS $850 million in lost revenue if that energy had been available on the grid. Their failure was also a huge 100,000 MW-hour loss of energy production when SA and Texas needed it most for basic survival.
2. CPS’s older regenerative natural gas plants, that supposedly provide rapid ramp up and rapid shut down capacity as needed, in fact only achieved about 55% capacity production during Storm Uri. Natural gas shortages contributed to this failure, and CPS had to buy large amounts of gas at extremely high market prices. During the week of Storm Uri, as a result of a. and b., CPS incurred a sudden unplanned debt of about $1 billion! We the rate payers are stuck with this bill.
CPS took partial but obviously insufficient action after the 2011 storm to winterize its facilities. Maybe they should have restrained their near annual habits of giving themselves multimillion dollar management bonuses, and spent more on winterizing our base load!
Austin Energy is not mentioned but is good for comparison. In Storm Uri they kept their plants running and were able to actually profit $54 million that week.
Last year our local Sierra Club was part of a Recall CPS coalition that worked to alert citizens to chronic mismanagement at CPS. It is fair to now say “we told you”.
CPS failures in Uri were multiple, predictable and largely inexcusable. Their CEO and Board of Trustees (BoT), exemplified by the fossil fuel Ed Kelley, over many years obstructed and ignored respectful input from the environmental and social justice communities. It is now a time similar to the CPS collapse a decade ago when warnings on nuclear power expansion were ignored until cost overrun scandals finally became public and the project had to be abandoned and the BoT largely replaced.
The new City Council (CC) needs to stop rubber stamp approval of all that CPS (and SAWS) does. They need to learn about our utilities. They need a permanent CC subcommittee providing oversight of SAWS and CPS with full access to utility information, and robust public input.
CPS has hired expensive outside legal counsel to fight its $1 billion debt, with little chance of success. It appears 3 in-house CPS attorneys resigned in protest, possibly of the strategy and/or the hiring of law firms to do things the in house attorneys can do at far lower cost. Perhaps outside consultations would be appropriate, and a lot cheaper.
Perhaps this whole effort is mostly for publicity. These attorneys join a number of other high ranking managers that have left CPS in the last 12 months, including Chief of Operations Chris Eugster. Greg Jefferson, Business Editor at SAEN has speculated in print that CPS CEO Paula Gold-Williams will be gone by the end of the year.
CPS also hired high dollar outside law firms to stop our Recall CPS PAC Charter Amendment petition drive, filing a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP). We are appealing this egregious case that denies the public its constitutional right to petition. The Mayor and City Council could immediately direct CPS to voluntarily dismiss this high cost case, done in the name of COSA and at citizen expense.