CenterPoint faces questions over Hurricane Beryl preparedness

CenterPoint Energy underwent its first round of scrutiny Tuesday over whether it adequately prepared for Hurricane Beryl, as more than 1 million Houston-area customers braced for days without power.

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, utility experts and local residents have questioned whether the company, which manages the electrical infrastructure serving nearly all of Harris and Fort Bend counties, could have done more to reduce widespread outages and shorten restoration times.

CenterPoint executives acknowledged they did not expect Beryl to hit Houston as hard as it did Monday morning, when the Category 1 hurricane slammed into the Texas coast and brought winds approaching 100 mph to the region. A CenterPoint spokesman said Tuesday that the company had not anticipated the storm heading toward Greater Houston, though meteorologists had widely predicted the potential for high winds and scattered flooding to hit the region.

Nearly 1.4 million customers were still without power Tuesday night, about 36 hours after Hurricane Beryl made landfall in Greater Houston. CenterPoint officials said most of them may not have power until Thursday at the earliest.

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Patrick, who is serving as acting governor while Gov. Greg Abbott is in Asia on an economic development trip, said Tuesday he expected the state Legislature and the Public Utilities Commission of Texas to review CenterPoint’s actions ahead of the storm. The lieutenant governor said he was reserving judgment on CenterPoint’s approach until he gets a full report on how the company planned and dispatched work crews, though he is skeptical of claims that the storm’s path has changed.

“I’m shocked that people were surprised by the storm coming to Houston,” Patrick said. “CenterPoint will have to answer for its actions if it prepared and positioned itself.”

CenterPoint executives tried Tuesday to dispel the notion that the company was unprepared for Hurricane Beryl, pointing to the 12,000 frontline workers who were working Tuesday to restore power. CenterPoint coordinated with about 2,500 utility crew members from outside the region and state to spring into action before the storm, then called in nearly 10,000 more after the hurricane hit Houston.

“No two storms are the same. We looked at the projected path and the possible impacts and prepared for that,” Alyssia Oshodi, CenterPoint’s communications director, said in an interview Tuesday.. “But the outcome was a little different than what we thought was the trajectory, and the impact was much greater than we initially thought we would see.”

About 2.2 million customers lost power because of the storm, CenterPoint officials said. The company hopes to have about 1 million outages repaired by Wednesday night, but it has not provided a timeline for when power will be delivered to the remaining customers.

CenterPoint’s Outage Tracker, a map of the Houston metro area highlighting outages, has been offline since May, when a derecho knocked out power to nearly a million customers. The lack of neighborhood-level detail left customers frustrated without real-time information on restoration estimates. CenterPoint released a stripped-down version of the map Tuesday night, showing areas where power had been restored and where it was still being restored.

A complex question

As online criticism and political pressure against CenterPoint intensified Tuesday, meteorologists and engineers warned that storm preparation is a complicated calculus for utility companies.

Michael Webber, a professor of energy resources and president of the University of Texas at Austin, said utilities must conduct a cost-benefit analysis before any severe weather event to determine how many outside crews to hire. Webber said he didn’t think CenterPoint was “particularly negligent,” noting that many people were caught off guard by the storm’s severity.

“You don’t know how bad the hurricane is going to be, and you don’t want to have 10,000 people there if you only need 3,000, because you have to pay for that,” Webber said. “It’s a balancing act.”

Matt Lanza, an editor and meteorologist at Space City Weather, said in an interview Tuesday that Beryl was much more destructive than expected in some areas. Lanza said the storm intensified quickly upon landfall and lasted longer than expected on land, producing damage more representative of a stronger Category 2 storm.

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“The weather people had been talking about it a few days before, saying we were really going to have some problems, especially south of I-10,” Lanza said. “The only thing that was a little surprising was the damage north of I-10. I didn’t expect to see that much damage there.”

Lanza said, however, that government officials and energy providers had at least two to three days’ notice that the storm could cause major problems in Houston. Paul Lock, CenterPoint’s manager of local government relations, said Tuesday that the storm had been moving in the 24 hours before it hit Houston.

“Especially after the derecho, why not prepare for something that might be more intense,” Lanza said.

Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo said she has also heard questions from the public about CenterPoint’s response, prompting her to ask for more information. For now, Hidalgo has expressed support for CenterPoint’s leadership.

“We’re all watching, we’re all upset, and what I’m trying to figure out is to be calm: Are they acting in good faith or not?” Hidalgo said. “And right now, I’m on the side of the former.”

“A fundamental examination”

As CenterPoint fields questions about its preparations for Beryl, Webber pointed to long-standing weaknesses in Texas’ electrical infrastructure — such as old poles, wires and transformers — as a problem that will continue to make hurricane season difficult for Houstonians.

“What’s happening now is more of a foretaste of what people think the future will be,” Webber said. “As a society, we have to accept that we built our electricity grid for the climate of the 1970s and now we have the climate of the 2020s.”

Webber noted that CenterPoint filed a sweeping resiliency plan with the Texas Public Utility Commission in April, outlining more than $2 billion in upgrades it wants to make between 2025 and 2027. The bulk of the spending, about $1.5 billion, would go toward replacing utility poles and towers, rebuilding circuits and modernizing equipment near the Gulf Coast.

Funding for the upgrades could come from government grants or customer rate increases, among other sources.

“We have to face a real soul-searching as a society,” Webber said. “That means investing more to make the system more robust, which is going to cost more.”

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, on Tuesday urged the region to “build back smart,” including by strengthening electrical infrastructure and continuing to push for the construction of the “Ike Seawall.” The Ike Seawall is a coastal barrier proposed to protect the Houston-Galveston area from storm surges caused by hurricanes.

“Let’s not rebuild exactly the same way, repeating the same disaster,” Cruz said. “I think that’s a very important issue to focus on.”

Journalist Paul Cobler contributed to this report.

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