Electricity business grows without the jolts
Big area provider adds thousands of power and natural gas customers
CENTERPOINT Energy did a lot of bulking up last year, from its infrastructure network to its customer bases to its annual revenue.
The company, which operates the Houston area’s main electric distribution system, which includes power lines and poles and transformers, as well as a multistate consumer natural gas business, added more than 90,000 customers. That included 55,000 electric customers, a 2.5 percent increase, in the Houston area and nearly 36,000 natural gas customers, a 1 percent in- crease, across six states.
A good portion of the electric customer bump is related to population growth, but the company did well among commercial and industrial businesses, said its president and CEO, Scott Prochazka. He noted strong demand in offering electric and gas services to customers adding or expanding chemical, refining and processing plants along the Houston Ship Channel.
Prochazka said the company isn’t necessarily tied to the ups and downs related to Houston’s energy economy, but instead tends to experience moderate, steady growth.
“We don’t cycle up as high, and we don’t fall as hard,” he said. “We are that steady aspect of the economy.”
The company’s annual revenue of $9.2 billion — an increase of 14 percent over the year before — helped it land at No. 9 on the list of top public companies, up from No. 78 the year before. It also posted earnings-per-share growth of 97 percent and had a shareholder return of 5 percent. The company, which also has an energy services operation, employs about 8,500 workers, about 4,700 of them locally.
Last year, CenterPoint spent more than $1.4 billion to update aging infrastructure and on normal repair and maintenance work. Those expenses, up nearly 15 percent over 2013, indirectly worked to make its system more reliable, he said.
Houston-based CenterPoint also made big strides in the way it communicates with customers. One example: a new customer information system called Power Alert Service that lets CenterPoint alert customers about a power outage via email, text or calls, including fix time, updates on the restoration process and confirmation when power is restored.