City Council Wants To Be A Part Of El Paso Electric Investigation

The City of El Paso has shown interest in being part of a state investigation into what went wrong with El Paso Electric last week, when thousands of people dealt with power outages.

During the freeze, much of El Paso Electric’s equipment froze, and the company lost all eight generators in two local power plants. The utility had to buy electricity from the open market because the power from their partially-owned Palo Verde Nuclear Power plant in Arizona, and a coal plant in New Mexico did not meet the needs of their market – which stretches from Hatch, NM to Van Horn, TX.

The state’s Public Utility Commission and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission are slated to investigate El Paso Electric because of the outages. The state investigation will look for three things.

1. Are El Paso Electric’s plants properly maintained? 2. Do they need an infrastructure update? 3. does the company have enough capability to server its market?

El Paso City Council wants to find out if they can sue the electric company over losses the city suffered because of the outages, and on behalf of ratepayers, for their losses.

“I think that the electric company has a lot to answer”, said City Representative Eddie Holguin, in an interview on Tuesday. He is concerned the company is a complacent monopoly that passes on too many costs to the ratepayers. “You don’t have to upgrade anything, you don’t have to worry about what happened over the weekend, because everyone is forced to buy your product”, he said, referring to the company.

Holguin suggested the city take a second look at the franchise agreement it has with the company. “If we have competition in this town, maybe they’ll take a little better care of their equipment, and be better prepared and offer a better service to the citizens of this community.”

El Paso Electric’s CEO, David Stevens said the constant outages are unacceptable, but said the company coped as best they could. “We believe that we did the things we needed to do and we believe that this was an unprecedented weather event. Saying that, we will try to learn from it, I’m not going to say we won’t. And we will do everything we can to prevent this from happening again”.

City Representatives have questioned if El Paso Electric has invested wisely. “There might be things that no utility can control for but we want to make sure that if there were areas that they could have controlled by either by better investment decisions, maintenance decisions, that they’ve done those things”, said Representative Susie Byrd.

Stevens said El Paso Electric has invested more than $190 million in local generation in the last 15 years. “We’ve been preparing for a number of years, we’re building a new power plant as we speak right now at the newman power station in northeast El Paso.”

There are concerns from the council that shareholders, many who do not live in the area, are profiting, while ratepayers may have to pay for the extra electricity the utility bought during the winter storm. “I’m very concerned about the 2-million dollars that the board of directors get and they’re not El Paso people primarily”, said Representative Ann Morgan Lilly.

“I’m a board member, we have two other local board members and it’s not unusual for a publicly-traded company to have board members stationed across a country. We have been in constant contact with the board and I can assure you they are very concerned, while they might be remote, they also understand we do a public service”, said Stevens.