CenterPoint’s January resiliency plan had a $5.75 billion price tag. A settlement cut the ask to $3.2 billion, and the Public Utility Commission of Texas trimmed further on Thursday.

The Public Utility Commission of Texas on Thursday approved a slimmed-down version of CenterPoint Energy’s system resiliency plan, ultimately approving about $2.7 billion for strategic hardening investments over the next three years.

Texas lawmakers in 2023 required electric utilities to submit resiliency plans to improve grid reliability. Oncor Electric’s $3 billion plan was the first to be approved, in November, and Entergy’s $137 million plan was approved in January.

CenterPoint’s original resiliency plan, filed in January, came in with a price tag of $5.75 billion. A June settlement cut the ask to $3.2 billion, and at the PUCT open meeting last week more was removed by commissioners.

Commissioner Courtney Hjaltman said she wanted to “remove a few measures that … seem more about replacing materials that have come to the end of their useful life,” and make changes to how the cost of some vegetation management is recovered.

Hjaltman filed a memo on Wednesday discussing her proposed reductions to the plan. She raised concerns about the level of detail in CenterPoint’s vegetation management plan and how the costs to transition from a five-year to a three-year tree-trimming cycle would be recovered. She said the utility’s proposal looked more like an “augment” to its base vegetation management budget and that “the lack of verifiable details for the individual programs leaves us unable to sufficiently distinguish the resiliency investment.”

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