David Guenther at the Texas Public Policy Foundation passed along my post about the performance of Houston’s electric utilities to various folks at TPPF. He sent me some comments by Talmadge Heflin: During the height of the storm, CenterPoint lost 100% of its service. As the storm subsided, one ping of the system brought 20% of its service back. During the regulated days, when they had an outage like this, they walked and drove the circuits because they had all of these people. Now they are using helicopters to check out the circuits. Also, much of their maintenance today is contract, making their operation leaner and they still have access to manpower when it is needed. More effective and efficient. I appreciate the analysis and agree with it.