CenterPoint Energy has reached an agreement on a $3.18 billion dollar resiliency plan. But, that is $2.57 billion less than the original $5.75 billion dollar plan.
"I think it was a proposal by CenterPoint that they could go with less work right now" said Ed Hirs, energy fellow at the University of Houston, "As we learned last year, there is an awful lot of upgrading that needs to be done."
This plan is a start, and is expected to improve overall resilience by 30%.
"Well, it should improve the opportunity for the grid to stay up" Hirs told KTRH, "It doesn't protect us from storms obviously, and there will still be weak links across the CenterPoint infrastructure. This is not addressing 100% of it."
Another reason why CenterPoint is not implementing the full plan, is cost. Specifically costs to customers. According to reports, CenterPoint customers will have to pay a little more than a dollar a month to help pay for the new resiliency plan.
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