By Rory Sweeney
AUSTIN, Texas — In a meeting with Carol Biedrzycki, you will know two things without question:
- If she isn’t talking, she has nothing to say.
- If she is talking, she will not stop until she has nothing else to say.
Candor and steadfastness are qualities that Biedrzycki, the consumer advocate in charge of Texas Ratepayers Organization to Save Energy (ROSE), developed over 24 years of engagement with the electricity industry. They’ve made “Carol B” a “storied figure” in state industry regulatory circles, said Ned Ross, who oversees government affairs for energy supplier Direct Energy.
“You can’t question her stamina and her tenacity at any point,” he said. “Interestingly, she finds herself on both sides of the table depending on the issues. Sometimes, she’ll be joined at the hip with industrial customers. Sometimes, she’ll be aligned with us. … She has an interesting job where she’s advocating for things that are consistent for her constituencies, but her constituencies are often aligned with different parties.”
She came to Texas ROSE as its executive director in 1992 after working at the Public Utility Commission of Texas for most of the 1980s. She is the organization’s first, and still only, employee. “When I took the job, all I had was the [organization’s] charter,” she said. “I had no office. Even the [tax] paperwork wasn’t finished for the IRS.”
In the ensuing two-plus decades, she has built the organization up enough to take the state’s electricity industry head on and found some success. From suspicious billing charges to questionable customer service practices, she campaigns to maintain the balance for consumer interests in a system that she feels is heavily weighted toward the industry.
The Regulator Experience
“It was amazing to me the amount of hold the industry had on what happened at the agency,” Biedrzycki said of her time at the PUC.
In fact, she found herself at one point in charge of a meeting to explain rules to industry representatives who she felt were actively trying to not understand them. As the person responsible for reviewing utilities’ energy efficiency programs, she kept hearing from the industry that they didn’t understand the rules. So she called a meeting of the stakeholders to hash out the misunderstandings.
The meeting was well attended, but completely silent.
“They wouldn’t ask a question, they wouldn’t say a word,” Biedrzycki remembers. “I managed to … provide them with what I thought the rule meant, and then the meeting was over. … If they would have been cooperative, then they would have had to submit something that made sense and fulfilled what we thought the requirements of the rule were.”
Instead, she felt, they wanted to maintain their plausible ignorance. “They really didn’t want to ever admit to understanding what the rule meant because they had no intention of complying with it,” she said.
The experience was one that molded Biedrzycki’s persistence. “I just stood in front of that room, and I thought, ‘It’s a good thing I’ve got three brothers who have given me a hard time my whole life’ because I was not really intimidated by them.”
The Story of Texas ROSE
In 1987, the PUC’s energy efficiency division was moved by the state legislature to the governor’s office and renamed the Energy Management Center. Biedrzycki moved with it to continue her work on increasing energy efficiency in the state, but she eventually left and ended up doing consulting work for federal energy efficiency programs.
The legislature earmarked funds for a consumer representation program to be administered through the Office of Public Utility Counsel, but the office thought it should be handled by a nonprofit. Texas ROSE was formed by a group of Austin insiders, who hired Biedrzycki as its executive director.
“The original purpose of the organization was to be a party at cases at the PUC, and I knew a lot of about that because I had direct involvement with it,” Biedrzycki said. “I also knew that it was a worthwhile endeavor because my experience is if you participate as a formal party at the commission … you always got something as a result of it.”
When ROSE’s state funding was eliminated, Biedrzycki scrambled to keep it afloat. The organization is now funded completely by grants, some of which come through Biedrzycki’s collaboration with the Texas Legal Services Center.
“The industry came after me,” she said. “I knew exactly what was going on, and I think they were kind of surprised when I showed up after” the funding was cut.
Staying the course is the first rule of winning regulatory battles, she said. “It’s a game of attrition. They just wait for people to become sick of it and get tired of it and drop off,” she said. “I always tell people: don’t start a utility issue unless you are prepared to carry it all the way through, because it’s the only way that you will see benefit and succeed. … As soon as you don’t show up, they think that you don’t care anymore and that you’re done with it.”
For all of her commitment, Biedrzycki appreciates that it’s mirrored by her organizations’ dedication in her.
“It’s just kinda nice to have people on your side,” she explains about why she took the position at Texas ROSE. “It was a wonderful thing to have people speak to you, ‘We think that what you’re doing is really important.’ How great is that? It doesn’t get much better than that.”
Bringing Back the Regulation
Biedrzycki’s biggest complaint about the industry is what she sees as the failure of power deregulation. Even before it arrived in Texas in 2002, she had been fighting for years to derail the deregulation movement and has spent the subsequent 14 years trying to get the price of power generation regulated again. She points out that several other states have done so and others, including Ohio, are considering it as well.
She believes deregulation was a mistake that hasn’t gotten better, Biedrzycki said. She regularly hears stories of consumers with bills that are hundreds of dollars a month. “I don’t have a background in economics,” she said, “but they took a business that had no middleman and inserted multiple middlemen. Just from a practical standpoint, that never made any sense to me.”
The Power to Choose
In the meantime, she’s remained focused on what she can do for consumers by recommending improvements to the PUC’s retail choice website, on which electric providers list their offers. While the site has received many improvements over the years, it can get better, she said. More than anything, she feels it needs to be simplified. There are too many plans, too much fine print and too much research required by consumers who were fine with just paying the bill when it arrived every month, she said.
“My own personal opinion is [companies] should not be permitted to charge fees for anything that they are required to do under the PUC’s rules because then that way everybody just has to include that cost in their rates and it makes it better for the consumer from a cost comparison perspective,” Biedrzycki said. “I’m really tired of everybody blaming everything on the consumer. You should be able to pay your bill and be left alone, and you should be able to be happy.”
Her opinions are backed up by nearly 100 comments from consumers on the issue filed with the PUC in May. Short and to the point, nearly each comment riffs on the same theme: buying electricity is too complicated. Biedrzycki would like to see the site have a way to calculate estimated monthly bills, along with requiring each retail electric provider to offer a plan that fits a standardized, PUC-approved model so consumers can make easy comparisons.
A recent workshop on the issue with PUC Chairman Donna Nelson produced another of Texas ROSE’s sometimes strange alliances.
“We found ourselves aligning on the vast majority of issues,” Direct Energy’s Ross said, “because we both were trying to find ways to reduce consumer confusion and make shopping easier.”
Respecting the Process
Despite her contentious positions, Biedrzycki’s years of dedication have afforded her respect. It was more than 10 years ago when she was working for the governor’s office that Nelson met Biedrzycki.
“She’s always struck me as someone who wanted to make a change. She wasn’t there for a paycheck,” Nelson said. “Carol does a really good job of representing her client base, which is low-income customers, but she really represents all residential customers — people who often don’t have a voice.”
Nelson also acknowledges that some companies have been “shysters” and “in many cases,” Texas ROSE has provided the information needed to heavily fine them or revoke their certifications. Biedrzycki has also engaged the PUC on several other projects, including revamping rules for company disclosures and ensuring the commercial viability of natural gas retailers.
“I don’t always agree with her, but I usually come to modify the position I went in with originally,” Nelson said. “You always want that counterbalance to what the utility or what the competitors in the competitive market want. … I’ve found that when I get everybody in a room, sometimes the [retail electric providers] will learn something from Carol.”
Building on her past success, Biedrzycki envisions a way for customers to import their actual usage data from the Smart Meter Texas website so they can quickly see how their monthly bills under each plan are likely to look. (See PUCT to Look at Smart Meter Web Portal.)
Aside from those future goals, Biedrzycki continues to advocate for billing assistance, weatherization programs and rate discounts for low-income consumers.
Nelson said it’s hard to have personal relationships while trying to be unbiased, but it’s also impossible not to become familiar because the same people present before the PUC so often that it’s “a small family.” She and Biedrzycki have shared similar medical experiences, and Nelson has noticed some of Biedrzycki’s quirks.
“Sometimes when she testifies, she puts her comments on pink paper so they stand out,” Nelson said. “She’s reasonable, but she’s passionate. Here you lose your credibility if you’re difficult.”
Richard Sedano, a principle at the Regulatory Assistance Project, met Biedrzycki when his organization convened meetings to bring consumer and environmental advocates together. He found out exactly what folks in Austin already knew.
“She is certainly not a shy person. She stepped up and said things she felt needed to be said,” he remembered. “Carol is her own person. … I thought she was really terrific.”
Outside the Office
Expecting to retire in perhaps a year and a half, Biedrzycki is already planning her next moves. Never married and an avid patron of the theater, she plans to spend her summers with family in Pittsburgh, Pa., and return to Austin when the theater season starts up in the fall. She volunteers at several theaters in town.
She is also planning to find a successor to groom. “That’s one thing that I have on the back burner,” she said.
While Biedrzycki has so many changes she’d like to see, she knows to take the long view. Just keep asking the questions, and eventually someone will answer.
“I think her presence [at meetings] — although maybe it’s uncomfortable at times for those who are on the other side — I think people take comfort that she’s there so that [her] interests are represented,” Ross said.