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Lawmakers reject bill that would have required utilities to publish resilience plans after statewide outages
Summary
Representative Powell’s bill proposing public reliability reports, vegetation-management plans, and mandatory after-action reports for larger electric systems failed in committee amid questions about cost, jurisdiction and whether existing reports suffice.
Representative Powell introduced a bill aimed at improving electric-system transparency and planning after a January ice storm that left thousands without heat. The measure would have required local electric systems serving 10,000 or more customers to produce annual reliability/resilience reports, publish vegetation-management plans, produce 10-year grid resilience plans with cost ranges, and issue major-outage after-action reports when thresholds are exceeded.
Powell said the bill would "provide the public real accounting of what went wrong, not a press release," and outlined five enforceable requirements intended to give customers information about reliability and restoration. Committee members voiced concern about the bill’s fiscal implications, whether TPUC’s jurisdiction covered the proposed mandates, and whether existing after-action efforts addressed the same problems. After deliberation, the measure failed in committee (vote: 2 ayes, 4 nays, 3 present-not-voting).
