Texas regulators last week approved a timeline for winding down its pandemic relief program as the state apparently escaped significant damage from Hurricane Laura.

The Public Utility Commission met briefly in an open session Thursday, the morning after the hurricane swept through the Texas-Louisiana border area.

The storm left 125,000 Texas customers without power, in PUC Chair DeAnn Walker’s estimation. “For this level of a storm, that’s astounding,” she said.

By Saturday morning, Entergy Texas was reporting more than 73,000 outages, mostly in southeast Texas.

The commission approved an order that formally winds down the state’s Electricity Relief Program (ERP), which has been providing customer protection from disconnection for nonpayment because of the COVID-19 pandemic since late March (50664). (See Texas PUC to End COVID Relief Program.)

The ERP was designed to prevent disconnections of those who lost jobs because of the pandemic. More than 595,000 households are currently participating in the program, which has provided more than $30 million in bill payment assistance.

Under the order, the program will stop taking enrollments on Monday. Disconnections for ERP enrollees may resume on Oct. 1, provided they have received at least 10 days advance notice, but not more than 30 days.

“This has been an unusually tough time for our state, and I am proud of our team for managing the details of a program that has protected so many Texans during a difficult time,” Walker said. “I hope we never encounter a similar challenge in the future.”

Texas has reported 622,496 COVID-19 cases and 12,526 deaths as of Friday.

SPS Rate Request Halved to $73.2M

The commission signed off on an unopposed settlement between Southwestern Public Service and other parties that allows the Xcel Energy subsidiary to raise its base rate by $73.2 million a year (49831).

The parties agreed to a “black-box settlement” — with a revenue total but no specific return on equity — of $88 million in base-rate revenues for SPS’ Texas retail jurisdiction. They also agreed to setting the utility’s transmission cost recovery factor to zero, resulting in the net impact of $73.2 million, effective Sept. 12, 2019.

SPS originally asked for an overall increase of $141.3 million/year in its request filed last year. It later reduced that amount to $129.7 million/year.

Parties to the agreement with SPS included PUC staff, the U.S. Department of Energy, Texas Industrial Energy Consumers, the Office of Public Utility Counsel, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local Union 602 and the Alliance of Xcel Municipalities.

In other actions, the PUC:

• approved a settlement agreement that allows Southwestern Electric Power Co. to recover $5.4 million in 2018 rate-case expenses through a rider (47141); and
• slapped retail electric provider Our Energy with a $30,000 administrative fee for not responding to informal customer complaints in a timely fashion (50983). The commission has now assessed more than $3 million in penalties during its financial year, which ends Monday.