SAN ANTONIO – San Antonio residents who were without power for longer than 24 hours during the February winter storm will be offered a credit to their account, CPS Energy announced in a news release Wednesday.
CPS Energy will issue the credit during the April or May bill, according to the news release. Roughly 251,606 customers are eligible to receive the credit.
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“A one-time credit in the amount of the Electric Service Availability Charge will be applied to impacted customers’ bills to recognize that power was not available to them,” CPS Energy officials said. “The Electric Service Availability Charge is the flat monthly cost of delivering electric service to customers and ranges from $8.75 for residential and small business customers to $10.50 for large use residential customers.”
Customers without power for 48 hours or longer will receive an additional one-time credit between $50-$100 depending on how long they were without power.
| Number of days without power | Credits | Customers affected |
|---|---|---|
| More than 4 | Electric Service Availability Charge + $100 | 77 |
| 3-4 | Electric Service Availability Charge + $75 | 1,378 |
| 2-3 | Electric Service Availability Charge + $50 | 23,064 |
| 1-2 | Electric Service Availability Charge | 227,087 |
In total, the credits add up to roughly $3.5 million, according to the news release.
“The 2021 Texas Winter Storm Event was a horrible experience for a number of our customers and many other Texans across our state,” said Paula Gold-Williams, CPS Energy President & CEO. “While we understand that no amount of money can make up for that experience, we are passionate about following through on the commitment we made during the storm to further help our customers who were most affected by the related outages. At the same time, we continue our fight to protect our customers and community from the financial impacts of the systemic market failure that occurred that week in February and the exorbitant and unlawful costs associated with those failures.”
The credit would provide some relief to hundreds of thousands of San Antonio residents who were left without power for days during the storm. The outages, imposed across much of the state of Texas to preserve the grid during record-breaking energy demands, led to busted water pipes and other costly property damage in some San Antonio homes.
Despite being without power, residents still have to pay for exorbitant energy prices incurred by CPS Energy during the storm. CPS Energy officials initially said those costs would be spread out for customers over a period of a decade or longer.
Natural gas prices skyrocketed during the storm, putting CPS Energy in a roughly billion-dollar hole.
In an effort to slash some of those costs, CPS Energy sued the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, accusing the state grid of overcharging the San Antonio municipal utility even after power was restored across most of the state.
Meanwhile, CPS Energy has now been sued by six San Antonio families, who claim the utility’s failures to provide power contributed to the deaths of their loved ones.