Few CPS power outages seen in 2019
Report says average customer went without electricity 2 1⁄ hours all year 2
An electric outage during a San Antonio summer could spell trouble for any household. But federal data released this week showed city residents last year dealt with fewer power outages than most electricity customers nationwide.
CPS Energy customers on average experienced a total of 154 minutes — a little over 2 1⁄ hours — without
2 power in all of 2019, the Energy Department reported.
Across Texas, the average electricity customer experienced nearly six hours worth of outages in 2019. Nationwide, the average was just over four hours.
In CPS surveys, customers regularly say reliability and low electricity rates are their top priorities, said Rudy Garza, interim chief customer engagement officer at the city-owned utility.
“We know for a fact that our customers, more than anything else, expect us to be reliable in our delivery of services,” Garza said. “We’re really proud of our team, our line crews and trouble shooters.”
More than 70 electricity providers operate in Texas. The majority are small electric cooperatives in rural areas serving 50,000 customers or fewer. Among the nine utilities that serve at least 250,000 customers in the state, CPS customers experienced the fifth lowest amount of time without electricity.
CPS is the largest public utility in Texas with 830,000 electricity customers, and second largest in the country after the Los Angeles Department of Power and Water.
Reliability varies city by city, depending on a variety of factors.
Austin Energy, the other large city-owned utility in Texas, serves 500,000 customers. Ratepayers there experienced only about an hour and a half worth of outages last year.
CPS Energy, however, has about twice as many above-ground cables as Austin Energy. A storm in Austin is less likely to knock out power, but the expensive underground infrastructure is reflected in the average Austin ratepayer’s bills, Garza said.
“There’s going to be some things you can’t control,” Garza said. “Cars running into poles that take out 2,000, 3,000 customers at a time — you can’t control somebody losing control and hitting a pole. That’s usually a four-, five-hour outage when you’ve got to replace a pole.” he said.
“Getting squirrels and buzzards in our system, which happens frequently
in San Antonio, is difficult,” he said.
San Antonio and other inland cities typically face fewer large storms that knock out power than do Gulf Coast cities.
City-owned electric utilities in recent years have performed more reliably nationwide than investorowned utilities and electric cooperatives, the Energy Information Administration reports.
But that has more to do more with the management of the utility than whether it’s publicly or privately owned, said Bob Hebner, director of the Center of Electromechanics at the University of Texas at Austin.
“People who own a cooperative, they could say, ‘I’m pretty comfortable with the outages I have,’” Hebner said. “But in a city like San Antonio, a data center can’t have a millisecond of outage. Where you are will determine how reliable you want to be, and how you pay for it.”
CPS technology, such as smart meters, quickly detects outages, Garza said, and the utility’s online outage map can show residents how soon they should expect power to come back on.
He also said CPS tracks outage trends and does preventative work in parts of the city that disproportionately lose power.
Power companies have upped their investments in technology to improve reliability, Hebner said.
“The whole industry is putting more emphasis on reliability. When (electricity) was just lights at night, you’d go to bed early,” he said. “Now, if it’s your banking, entertainment, transportation, all of a sudden it becomes a whole lot more important that it’s reliable, and people are willing to pay more for reliability.”