Is Houston’s Slow Recovery From Hurricane Beryl a Sign of a Bigger Problem?

Days after Category 1 Hurricane Beryl made landfall, millions of people in the Houston area lost power as temperatures soared to dangerous levels. Storm preparedness and response are rightly being called into question.

On a business trip to Asia, Governor Greg Abbott asked the Public Utilities Commission to study what happened and determine whether it is part of a broader system failure. The question that needs to be answered is whether Texas’s electric infrastructure and disaster response in general is dangerously fragile and inadequate. We believe it is, and that these problems should be high on the Texas Legislature’s “solutions” list when it reconvenes early next year.

In an interview with Bloomberg TV from overseas, Abbott asked “why does this keep happening in Houston,” presumably referring to a windstorm in May that knocked out power to more than a million Houston-area customers. He also wondered aloud whether structural flaws in the power distribution system or a shortage of workers in the right places contributed to the problems restoring power.

Abbott wasn’t the only elected official looking for answers. Houston Mayor John Whitmire said the area’s energy provider, CenterPoint, “needs to do a better job,” and U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia, whose congressional district includes parts of Houston, blasted CenterPoint for “creating a public health crisis by forcing people to recover from a hurricane while they’re surviving extreme heat.”

Abbott’s focus on the Houston area is a good place to start, but a full analysis must include not only how state leaders, electric utilities, the grid and other parts of the state’s power systems responded, but also whether the problems in Houston can help shape better emergency responses elsewhere in the state in the event of tornadoes, high winds or other natural disasters. Severe storms in late May and early June also knocked out power to millions of people in North Texas for days.

Texas is located in an extreme weather zone and will continue to be hit by record heat waves, catastrophic flooding, and deadly storms that drive up electricity costs and compromise service reliability. After a winter storm in 2021 nearly destroyed the state’s entire power grid, Texas lawmakers committed billions of dollars to shore up the grid, subsidize gas-fired power plants with low-interest loans and grants, and encourage businesses to adopt strategies and equipment to keep the power on.

Few energy experts believe the state has done enough to shore up the grid, which had its skeptics even before the 2021 storm. As more businesses and residents move to Texas, grid reliability and the ability to restore power after a natural disaster have taken on new urgency. Scorching heat days, devastating cold snaps and now-slow disaster recovery times are raising additional concerns about the overall vulnerability of the state’s electricity ecosystem that must be addressed now.

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