Storm’s bills fall on military, too
Bases’ power costs, paid by taxpayers, in millions
You might have heard of Scott Willoughby, who had $19,033 charged to a Visa credit card for his light bill in the wake of Winter Storm Uri.
He paid it. But Willoughby, 63, a retired Dallas-area custom homebuilder who has returned to work to recover the loss, was hardly alone.
Military bases in Texas got monster electric bills, too. And your tax dollars are paying those.
Fort Hood’s utility statement for February of last year was $1.2 million. Weighing the effect of the historic storm, a team at its public works office swallowed hard and calculated that it would be $30 million this time.
They were on the low side — by $5.9 million.
“Yeah, we definitely had some sticker shock. I’ve had a lot of fun explaining to people about a $35.9 million electric bill for the month of February,” said Brian Dosa, who heads the office.
That bill — enough to buy four M1 Abrams tanks — was driven by a stunning price hike for a kilowatt-hour of electricity, from 5 cents to $9, over a few days.
Other military installations across the state are in the same predicament if they get their power through utilities on the Electric Reliability Council of Texas grid. ERCOT, as the nonprofit consortium is called, operates the grid for nearly 90 percent of Texas.
Dyess AFB in Abilene, home to 33 B-1B bombers, more than half the fleet, was charged $6 million. Usually it’s $250,000 to $300,000 in February.
Naval Air Station Corpus Christi’s
projected bill is more than $11.2 million, well above what it paid the previous February, $382,000. Naval Air Station Kingsville’s February bill was $2.6 million — a year ago, it was $108,000.
Rod Hafemeister, a spokesman at NAS Kingsville, said he didn’t know if the Navy intended to protest the bill, but it does plan to pay it.
At Fort Hood, where the storm dumped 2.9 inches of snow Feb.
15 and drove temperatures to a low of 2 degrees, the bill would have been higher if the post hadn’t launched a 2016 initiative to get half its electricity from solar and wind energy.
The post has a 15-megawatt solar array — some 65,000 solar panels on 132 acres on West Fort Hood — and draws from 20 wind turbines northeast of Lubbock that generate 40 megawatts. (A megawatt is 1,000 kilowatts.)
The San Antonio-based Army Installation Management Command said it intends to pay the bill from Apex Clean Energy, a company in Charlottesville, Va., that provides Fort Hood with both fossil fuel and renewable power. It’s trying to renegotiate the bill, but the clock is ticking.
The federal Prompt Payment Act requires payment of bills within 30 days of receipt, said the command’s spokesman, Scott Malcom. Otherwise, the government must pay interest — at the moment just under 1 percent.
“There are going to be concerns, and I’m confident that there are going to be a lot of questions asked” at the Pentagon about the stratospheric prices authorized by ERCOT and the reliability of its grid, said retired Air Force Gen. Gene Habiger, who led the U.S. Strategic Command.
The storm slammed through Texas, plunging temperatures to 9 degrees in San Antonio on Feb. 15 and subjecting the state’s residents to days of intermittent or nonexistent electric service as power suppliers were shut down. Water utilities were unable to operate pumps, and pipes burst in many homes.
The extent of the financial damage caused by the high rates for power may not be known for months, and the litigation it spurred likely will take longer. The physical and human toll of the catastrophe has only recently come into focus.
Hearst Newspapers, in an analysis published last week, estimated that nearly 200 Texans died of storm-related causes — twice the official estimate.
Some military installations in the Lone Star State haven’t gotten their electric bills yet, including five of the Texas bases under the Air Force’s Air Education and Training Command — Joint Base San Antonio-randolph, Jbsalackland, Goodfellow AFB in San Angelo, Sheppard AFB in Wichita Falls and Laughlin AFB in Del Rio.
“What I’ve learned was that the bases are not on a real-time rate and it will take months to determine the impacts from the winter storm,” AETC spokeswoman Marilyn Holliday said.
A Laughlin spokesman, Joel Langton, said the base had not received an invoice, but it has a fixed-rate plan with its provider, AEP, which serves Del Rio.
Randolph, Lackland and JBSAFORT Sam Houston are customers of CPS Energy, which has refused to pass $1 billion in extra charges it incurred during the storm to its customers. It has sued ERCOT and several of its natural gas suppliers, accusing them of price gouging.
Asked if CPS customers ultimately might have to pay the bill, Mayor Ron Nirenberg said lawmakers and regulators in Texas “should be doing everything possible” to keep ratepayers from bearing exorbitant energy costs, including using the nearly $11 billion in the state’s rainy day fund.
“It’s absolutely disgusting” that military bases and ordinary ratepayers are already taking the hit, Nirenberg added.
“The price gouging and the mismanagement of the Texas energy grid during the storm has direct and certain impact, and clearly we see that those impacts now are even on our national defense,” he said.
Citing privacy rules, CPS Energy would not disclose the February bills for JBSA, which provides logistics for the three bases here and the Camp Bullis training range in Northwest Bexar County.
Fort Bliss in El Paso and Red River Army Depot near Texarkana were spared from sharply higher fuel costs because they receive power from regulated utilities and are not part of the ERCOT grid. Red River, with around 4,000 workers, is the largest employer in the Texarkana area.
“This was unprecedented,” said Jerry Sparks, retired economic development director for the city of Texarkana. “We lived through it, and I don’t know what these people (served by ERCOT) are going to do. It’s a screwy system.”
The grid’s failure isn’t just about sky-high light bills — it’s antiquated and poorly managed, and military readiness is one of the things it puts at risk, said University of Houston energy economics professor Ed Hirs, a longtime ERCOT critic.
“If I’m a bad actor, domestic or foreign, I would do what I could to take out the Texas grid because then I’d have, what, 40 million people dependent upon some sort of immediate need for national support. We’d be a ward of the country,” Hirs said in an interview last week.
“Communications would be down, health care gone, you couldn’t very well travel anywhere,” he said. “You wouldn’t have any pumps at the gas stations to pump gasoline. This would be a nightmare.”
Willoughby, the Dallas-area homebuilder, was on a variable rate plan with Griddy Energy and had authorized it to charge his credit card — which it did, repeatedly, during and after the storm. The company has filed for bankruptcy.
A 10-year Army veteran who left the service as a sergeant in 1985, Willoughby took money out of a savings account to pay the tab.
“It’s one of the few times in life that you wished you didn’t have any money or your credit wasn’t any good,” he joked. “I did a Gofundme. I got a little bit out of that.”
Willoughby was looking to the Legislature for help and has joined a class-action lawsuit against ERCOT.
“I am angry, but there’s really not much that I can do,” he said.