CPS disconnections ahead
Cutoffs for those behind on bills start in months
Facing a severe financial crunch, CPS Energy officials said Monday that the utility will resume — in the next three or four months — disconnecting customers who haven’t paid their power bills.
City-owned CPS suspended disconnections last spring when thousands of its customers lost their jobs early in the COVID-19 pandemic.
A year later, the economy is slowly recovering as more residents receive COVID-19 vaccinations — and many of CPS’ customers have returned to work. At the same time, the utility is grappling with about $1 billion in expenses it racked up during the winter storm in February.
CEO Paula Gold-williams said CPS will decide when to restart disconnections based on the vaccination rate in San Antonio. Once it’s set a date, it will give customers a 30-day notice.
“By late spring to early summer, we will restart the disconnect process,” Gold-williams said. “As the community comes back and gets to the right balance of restarting the economy and people getting back to work, then we would correlate with restarting disconnects at that time.”
Customers’ unpaid bills have been piling up over the last year.
As of Jan. 31, customers owed $93 million in past-due power bills. By comparison, the utility faced $38 million in outstanding bills in January 2020, before the pandemic.
In the meantime, the financial pressure on CPS is mounting.
It paid exorbitant prices for electricity and natural gas during last month’s deep freeze. The utility is also preparing to embark on a plan to close its aging power
plants and increase its reliance on clean energy — an added expense.
Mayor Ron Nirenberg, a CPS trustee, cautioned against restarting disconnections too quickly, while San Antonians are still reeling from the pandemic.
“I don’t see that the vaccination process has an immediate impact on the financial realities that so many of our residents are struggling with right now,” Nirenberg said.
He called on CPS’ five-member board at its next meeting to examine the financial impact of power disconnections before moving ahead with a restart date.
“I want to make sure that we don’t finalize or communicate any firm deadlines about resuming disconnects in the meantime,” Nirenberg said.
CPS officials Monday also discussed how the utility might prepare for the next winter blast. The utility came up short during last month’s storm.
Gold-williams said CPS would improve its winterization standards at its power plants to make sure a bout of freezing weather won’t knock plants out of operation — as it did as temperatures plunged in February.
“We did do quite a bit of freeze protection,” Gold-williams said. “However, again, we think we’re going to have to have higher standards of freeze protection based upon what we saw” last month.
She also said the utility is looking at increasing the amount of natural gas it stores to be better prepared for another energy crisis.
Last month, CPS ran out of natural gas and was forced to buy the fuel on the spot market, where gas suppliers raised their prices by as much as 16,000 percent. CPS has since sued more than a dozen gas suppliers, accusing them of pricegouging.
The utility is weighing whether to expand its gas reserves by 140 percent — from 5 billion cubic feet of storage to 12 billion.
Increasing storage space for natural gas would allow CPS to keep 10 days’ worth of fuel on hand, rather than the three days’ worth of gas the utility currently stores.
Also Monday, CPS officials said the utility has received 650 proposals from companies for its clean energy initiative, the Flexpower Bundle.
CPS asked companies for bids to build 900 megawatts of solar power, as well as 50 megawatts of battery storage and 500 megawatts of additional capacity — either from a new gas-fired plant or a cuttingedge power-generating technology.
The new power sources would allow CPS to close some of its gasfired power plants that it built in the 1960s and 1970s. CPS officials will award contracts for the initiative in late July.
But Trustee Ed Kelley, a longstanding skeptic of investments in renewable energy, argued that the utility should not pay to build more solar or wind power until battery storage technology has progressed.
Solar and wind power are intermittent and depend on the weather, so they often can’t deliver power when it’s needed. Better battery storage would help close the gaps.
Solar farm operators could charge a battery array during the day when the sun is highest and discharge the energy in the evening, when more people are at home using electricity.
Currently, CPS owns a small amount of battery storage capacity, and most batteries today can hold power for four hours at most.
Until the technology improves, Kelley said, more investment in solar power don’t make sense.
“To go out and spend ... so that you can do what’s politically correct — to me — is dumb,” Kelley said. “What we need to do, in my opinion, is work very hard on storage.”
Nirenberg noted, however, that gas- and coal-fired plants failed
during the winter storm last month. CPS can add more renewable energy while also improving reliability, he said.
“This shouldn’t be a choice between environmental stewardship and the fiscal realities,” Nirenberg said. “We can have both. The notion that we can’t, I think, is one we’ve already moved past a long time ago.”