After Hurricane Beryl devastated the Houston region last year, Texas’ most prominent leaders issued extraordinary rebukes of the area’s primary utility, CenterPoint Energy.
Gov. Greg Abbott said the company “lost the faith and trust of Texans.” Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the state’s most powerful lawmaker who presides over the Senate, accused the company of “potential fraud” and “poor money management.” And state Sen. Phil King, vice chair of a legislative committee that oversees utilities, claimed that “CenterPoint deceived me, the Legislature and the public.”
The criticism came as the Houston Chronicle revealed that CenterPoint had invested almost a billion dollars in power generators that were mostly unusable, even as nearly 1 million of its customers remained in the dark four days after Beryl hit…