Hundreds of thousands of CenterPoint Energy customers are entering their second week without power. 88,000 CenterPoint customers were without power Tuesday morning, eight days after Beryl swept through Southeast Texas.
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CenterPoint Energy Executive Vice President Jason M. Ryan speaks during a Public Utilities Commission meeting on Thursday, July 11, 2024, in Austin.
Credit:
Sergio Flores, The Texas Tribune
About 10,000 customers who get power through other utilities also were without power Tuesday morning.
CenterPoint said they expect 98% of customers to have power restored by Wednesday night. It's unclear when power will be restored to the remaining 2% of affected customers, about 45,000 homes and businesses. The company's outage tracking shows some homes in Harris County won't have power restored until Friday. Thomas Gleeson, chairman of the Public Utilities Commission, which regulates electricity, said the company's goal was to restore power by Friday to all homes and businesses with access to electricity.
Gleason said at a news conference Monday that some homes and businesses were so damaged that they would be without power by Friday.
Jason Ryan, executive vice president of regulatory services and government affairs at CenterPoint, said longer outages are expected to occur in hard-hit areas of parts of Matagorda, Brazoria and Galveston counties, among others. .
Ryan told commissioners that slower work will involve rebuilding long spans of infrastructure, such as utility poles that are broken and toppled to the ground.
“We know we have a lot of work to do and we won't stop working until it's done,” Ryan said.
Hurricane Beryl tore through Southeast Texas on Monday, knocking out power to nearly 3 million electricity customers in the state.
CenterPoint, the Houston-area power company, has made dissatisfaction over its communications with residents amid another massive power outage in Texas. The company appears to be in disarray as it struggles to provide power to angry people facing dangerously high temperatures without air conditioning, including stressed customers grappling with health issues without power. More than 48 hours after the storm left the area, the company still has no clear timeline for when people will have power restored.
Yet despite heavy criticism from elected officials about the length of the outages, Centerpoint appears to have restored power to people more quickly than it did after recent storms.
“We have never before restored more than 1 million customers in more than two days after a hurricane, and that can only be done if we are fully prepared,” Ryan said at Thursday's PUC meeting.
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Entergy CEO Eliecer “Eli” Viamontes speaks during a Public Utilities Commission meeting on Thursday, July 11, 2024, in Austin.
Credit:
Sergio Flores, The Texas Tribune
Entergy Texas, which serves College Station and Beaumont, still had about 4,200 customers without power Monday morning, according to PowerOutage.us; Texas-New Mexico Power was providing power to parts of Houston and the Gulf Coast. More than 3,600 customers were without power in areas around Brazoria, while AEP Texas extended from Brownsville to Bay City, with about 142 customers without power.
Utility representatives told state regulators Thursday they were prepared for the storm. PUC Chairman Thomas Gleeson told Ryan that once the repairs are completed, the utility company needs to reach out to the community to listen to feedback.
“The public expects more communication, more frequent communication, different communication methods,” Gleeson said. “So I think we all have an absolute responsibility to look at how we communicate going forward.”
—Emily Foxhall, Alejandra Martinez, Dante Motley and Pooja Salhotra
