CenterPoint consumers and businesses in Southeast Texas will be seeing only a slight increase in their bills starting this month, amounting to about 12-cents per customer on average -- easily affordable, yes, but one Houston energy expert says we can't afford to ignore deteriorating pipelines.

City of Houston administrators call the small bill increase a big win for the city, after city council refused an earlier rate hike proposed by the gas distribution company that amounted to about $5 a month.

"What CenterPoint had proposed was a consolidation of the service area into one, which of course would reduce their administrative costs significantly but some of the areas in the service area are more expensive to maintain than just the Houston area," according to University of Houston Energy Fellow Ed HIrs.

Part of the idea under the plan that was rejected by city council has to restructure customer billing in Southeast Texas in such a way that it would raise rates in higher-populated areas and lower rates in the lower-populated areas.

On the electricity transmission and delivery side of CenterPoint, the company has said it will forge on with plans for its Grid Resilience Plan, which will cost billions of dollars for its electricity customers, but there is no similar plan for mass improvement of infrastructure on the natural gas delivery side of the company -- and there needs to be such a plan, Hirs says.

"A lot of the natural gas infrastructure that CenterPoint is using was put in place 50, 60, 70 years ago and steel and iron will rust and deteriorate over time and that has to be replaced."

There's no need to wait until those deteriorating pipelines leak and put some members of the public in danger, but there has been no clear plan to improve the pipeline system either, and that's a failure of leadership, Hirs notes.

"The regulatory compact is broken.

"The regulators need to be ahead of the game and thinking about what needs to be done to protect society."

In response to this story, CenterPoint sent KTRH the following statement.

"CenterPoint Energy is focused on providing value and safe service to its gas customers and respects working cooperatively with all stakeholders. These important safety investments and upgrades are essential to meeting the current and future energy demand for one of the fastest growing regions in the nation and includes improvements to reliably deliver natural gas across Texas.

On June 25, the Railroad Commission of Texas unanimously approved a comprehensive settlement of CenterPoint Energy’s application to set new natural gas base rates for the company’s approximately 1.9 million Texas customers. CenterPoint Energy remains dedicated to its capital investment strategy, with the over $15 billion 10-year natural gas capital investment plan across its jurisdictions through 2030 expected to largely support pipeline modernization, smart metering technology, growth and customer additions."

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