HOUSTON – With Hurricane season three months away, KPRC 2 spoke with Houston’s largest electric utility provider to see how it’s preparing for potential outages during future storms.
You’ve probably seen CenterPoint Energy’s utility crews working in your neighborhood — trucks parked along curbs, traffic cones narrowing busy streets, crews replacing poles and trimming trees under the Texas sun.
For many drivers, those cones are an inconvenience. But the company says they represent something else: progress.
After Hurricane Beryl left millions without power for days — in some cases, weeks — CenterPoint Energy faced intense criticism and growing frustration from customers across Houston. In response, the utility provider made a promise: fewer outages and faster restoration when the next storm hits.
The result is what the company calls its Greater Houston Resiliency Initiative — a sweeping plan to harden and modernize the electrical grid.
“This is part of our Greater Houston Resiliency Initiative,” said Nathan Brownwell, Vice President of Resilience and Capital Delivery for CenterPoint Energy. “We’re going out to our communities to harden and modernize our system.”
Since Hurricane Beryl, the company said crews have installed more than 430 miles of underground power lines — roughly the distance from Houston to El Paso. They’ve also cleared more than 8,000 miles of vegetation near power lines and installed approximately 60,000 new power poles across the Greater Houston area.
Many of those new poles are fiberglass, designed to withstand winds up to 130 miles per hour — equivalent to a Category 4 hurricane. For comparison, Hurricane Beryl made landfall as a Category 1 storm.
But with hurricane season approaching, many residents are asking the same question: Is it enough?
“We feel much more prepared than we ever have been in our history,” Brownwell said. “We will be ready for hurricane season.”
He says preparations ramp up well before the first named storm forms. In May, the company conducts its annual hurricane preparedness drill — setting up staging sites, mobilizing crews, and rehearsing response plans.
“We take extreme weather seriously,” Brownwell said. “We understand our customers’ concerns. We want to earn their trust back. Everything that we do is an opportunity to show them that we are on the right path.”
If you’d like to check the progress of CenterPoint Energy’s resiliency projects in your neighborhood, click here.