Houston Utility Slammed Over Fumbled Response to Beryl Power Outages

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(Bloomberg) — Thousands of people in the Houston area were still without power more than a week after Hurricane Beryl tore through the fourth-largest US city. Two factors are now emerging as important explanations for why the powerful but predictable storm caused so much disruption: a shortage of workers at CenterPoint Energy Inc., Houston’s main utility, and the company’s limited management of vegetation growing alongside electricity poles and power lines.

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Interviews with nearly a dozen experts, including grid-reliability consultants, watchdogs and academics, along with public filings and reports from repair crews reveal the challenges facing the utility that’s responsible for powering America’s fourth-largest city. 

Experts consistently pointed to the small number of workers secured ahead of the storm, which delayed restoration efforts. At the same time, many of those interviewed say the company hasn’t done enough in recent years to cut back the trees that grow alongside its electric system — with CenterPoint itself now indicating that downed trees and branches were at the heart of the serious damage from Beryl. 

Those issues, combined with limited communication with customers, created the chaos that left Texans blasting the company, with families left sweltering in intense heat without air conditioning. When a graffiti artist painted “CenterPointle$$” on the side of the highway, the words quickly resonated across the city that likes to market itself as the “Energy Capital of the World.”

“These storms are not surprising. Why do we react like they are?” said Thomas Coleman, chief executive officer of consultant Structure Energy Solutions and a long-time expert on grid reliability based in Atlanta. “Why are we not prepared? Why a week later, when we know it’s going to be 100 degrees in July, do we still have hundreds of thousands of people without power?”

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As public officials slam the utility for its response, CenterPoint has maintained that the power-restoration efforts were swift, especially in comparison to other post-hurricane recoveries. The utility also had to swing into gear to ramp up preparations as the storm’s trajectory continuously shifted ahead of the strike on Houston.

Before hitting Texas, Beryl had already made history as the strongest-ever June hurricane, with breakneck intensification that brought howling winds and pounding rains as it crashed through the Caribbean at the end of June and first days of July. Late into the July Fourth holiday weekend, it started to become clear that the storm was headed to the Houston area next. 

“We were tracking the progress as it was going through the Gulf, and once we were able to recognize that it was somewhat hitting our direction, we went out and secured mutual assistance resources,” Brad Tutunjian, a vice president at CenterPoint, said in an interview. 

The company secured 3,000 workers in the days ahead of the storm. But that would prove to be far short of what was required. 

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The day Beryl hit, CenterPoint scrambled to call in reinforcements, securing a total of 10,000. That number kept growing as crews faced an onslaught of debris, felled trees and snapped utility poles. Eventually, the total would reach about 14,000 workers — several times larger than the initial plans. 

“It was such a widespread event that they needed more resources than they anticipated,” said Glenda Thomas, CEO of Alabama-based ElectraGrid Solutions, which sent crews to help CenterPoint with the restoration effort.

Thomas said her crews, who specialize in repairing and replacing power poles, have faced challenges getting into areas where work needs to be completed because downed trees, shrubbery and debris all have to be cleared out first. “Because nobody thought the storm was going to hit Houston, they didn’t have enough pre-planning crews in place,” she said. 

The backlash has been fierce. 

A group of Houston restaurants that lost power for days has sued the utility. Houston Mayor John Whitmire, who lost power at his house, said he will hold CenterPoint accountable. And Texas Governor Greg Abbott called for an investigation into CenterPoint’s preparation and response to the storm, threatening to punish the company if it didn’t reform. 

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“In the wake of Hurricane Beryl’s landfall, CenterPoint has lost the faith and trust of Texans,” Abbott wrote in a letter addressed to CenterPoint CEO Jason Wells, directing him to improve the company’s severe weather preparation. 

Texas has been walloped by extreme weather this year. In Houston alone, Beryl is the second event that’s knocked power out for days — a windstorm in May punched windows out of skyscrapers and left almost 1 million homes and businesses without electricity. The onslaught illustrates a phenomenon that’s on the rise because of climate change: “compound events,” when the weather goes haywire in back-to-back or overlapping spells. 

It’s now Texas — not California or Florida — that’s become the US epicenter of extreme weather, adding more pressure to the state’s electric grid that is already widely known to be shaky. That’s at a time when Texas has seen a boom for population and for businesses ranging from crypto mining to data centers, all of which use huge amounts of electricity. And Elon Musk said on Tuesday that he will relocate the headquarters for X and SpaceX to Texas. 

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CenterPoint has one of the most rickety urban grids in the country, according to data compiled in April by Whisker Labs Inc., which has developed technology to monitor grid faults and other issues. Texas regulators have fined the utility for failing to meet service and reliability standards. Grocery store chain H-E-B told regulators several years ago that CenterPoint’s system was so unreliable that it had to buy backup generators for its stores to prevent food from spoiling.  

At the peak of the Beryl-related outages, more than 2.2 million CenterPoint customers lost power after the hurricane made landfall on the Texas coast early July 8. Two days later, on the morning of July 10, that figure still topped 1 million as the city was under a heat advisory. It stayed in the range of hundreds of thousands for days longer. And meanwhile, temperatures through the week were in the mid 90sF, and with the humidity factored in, it felt closer to 106F (41C).

“Houston goes through one or two extreme weather events a year,” said Alison Silverstein, an electric reliability consultant. “Getting out work orders and maximizing them to get customers back on quickly should be something CenterPoint knows how to do. This should be their strong suit.”

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By the afternoon of July 19, CenterPoint’s outage number had finally dropped to less than 4,000, according to PowerOutage.us.

CenterPoint has defended its restoration pace, saying that it had never before brought back more than 1 million customers in a little over two days after a hurricane. 

“I’ve been working on hurricane responses for my 26-year career here at CenterPoint Energy. I have never seen anything this swift,” Tutunjian said. “During Hurricane Rita, when I was in southeast Texas, that was 32 days without power. Hurricane Ike was 18 days.” 

Hurricane Rita, which struck in 2005, was the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico, according to the National Weather Service. Ike, in 2007, was a category 2 hurricane at landfall. Beryl was at category 1 when it hit Texas. Still, Houston’s international airport was hit with slightly stronger wind gusts during Beryl than during Ike.

When it came to planning for workers, Tutunjian said: “We were fully prepared when we were watching the storm come in nine days in advance,” adding that the company acted quickly to call in additional crews once the extent of the storm damage became clear. 

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The company can’t be certain of “the extent of the damage until we completely walk” the electric system’s circuits, which was roughly 9,000 miles, he said.

“Having your crews just sitting here, for one, is not gonna be productive. And secondly, it’s not safe,” Tutunjian said. The work involves sending “people where trees are falling into homes — there’s damage with debris. We just can’t put their life in jeopardy.” 

There’s also the infrastructure needed for staging areas for workers. And the crews need to be fed, given safety briefings and issued equipment all before work can fully begin. 

“Calling up essentially a full army division of people is a huge effort,” said Ed Hirs, an energy fellow at the University of Houston. “They have to become familiar with the system here — the rules and the wiring. It’s a logistical nightmare.”

But meanwhile, as the lights stayed off so did CenterPoint’s outage map. Customers found that the company’s website didn’t have a power-restoration tracker. And residents have complained that the utility wasn’t providing helpful updates in any other way as they baked in the heat. 

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With no CenterPoint tracker available, a social media post suggested using the Whataburger app to see which of the fast-food chain’s restaurants were closed during business hours — presumably due to a lack of electricity.

“The kind of communication we’ve seen has been absolutely too low,” Kamil Cook, a climate and clean energy associate of the Texas office of Public Citizen, said at a regulatory hearing last week. 

Hurricane Beryl was “a disaster that could have been avoided,” Cook added. “CenterPoint had days to prepare for the approach, and months and years of evidence of weak resilience.”

CenterPoint has acknowledged that it could have improved its communication with customers about its storm recovery efforts. The utility’s outage map had been down since the May windstorm. The company put up a new map toward the end of last week, but residents complained it was difficult to decipher. 

“We understand our customers’ frustration from not having our outage tracker over the past several weeks. We are committing to launching a cloud-based solution in early August that customers can rely on as the best source of information,” the company said in an emailed statement to Bloomberg News. “We also are resolved to do a better job helping customers plan for when they will have information about when power will be restored to their homes and businesses.”

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The vast majority of the Beryl-related outages were caused by trees and branches being blown into distribution lines, the utility has said. 

CenterPoint has doubled investments in its electric system over the past five years, including in grid hardening, modernization and resiliency, the company said in a statement. From 2022 to 2023, the utility increased spending on vegetation management efforts by 32%.

And public filings show that the company’s total spending on pro-actively removing and managing hazardous trees threatening power lines has indeed jumped, with annual costs climbing to a record $3.66 million in 2023. That was partly because of drought conditions extending back to the prior summer.

But the miles of area covered by that spending has declined from prior peaks. The utility covered about 4,600 miles in 2023, after the figure fell to record lows in the previous two years.

“They are not doing enough,” Coleman, the grid-reliability expert, said in relation to vegetation management. “You know in Houston you have these big live oak trees, and the branches come down in every storm.”

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Amid Houston’s population boom, CenterPoint has seen a proliferation of fast-growing trees that need more maintenance, according to filings. The city has become a tree market worth $1 billion annually, with developers favoring species like elms or willows, which can become taller than poles and can be more susceptible to damage in high winds, said Barry Ward, executive director at Trees for Houston, the largest urban tree planter that also does work with CenterPoint.

And Texas doesn’t mandate hurricane-hardening requirements for its electric utilities, unlike Florida, which put them in place nearly 20 years ago after the state was hit by a series of major hurricanes. 

“If we want a system that’s more resilient for a Category 1 or worse storm in a pretty populated area, we are going to harden the grid and we are going to need to spend the money before they have a loss of economic activity and the loss of life,” said Joshua Rhodes, an electricity expert and research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. “We will either pay for it now or later.”

—With assistance from Kevin Crowley and Jade Khatib.

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