Greater Houston Area Resiliency
CenterPoint Energy is taking action to improve our resiliency, customer communications and community partnerships, and better prepare for the next major storm or hurricane.
Following Hurricane Beryl, we have heard the call to action from our customers and elected officials and are responding with bold actions. We are determined to learn the lessons from Hurricane Beryl and build the most resilient coastal grid in the country that can better withstand the extreme weather of the future.
On August 5, 2024, we launched the Greater Houston Resiliency Initiative (GHRI) – a three-phase series of targeted actions to strengthen resiliency, improve our public and customer communications, and develop stronger local community partnerships so we are better prepared to respond to the next storm or hurricane.
“We know how important reliable and resilient energy is to our 2.8 million customers and that the Greater Houston region is the economic engine for the State of Texas and the energy capital of the world. That is why we are so focused on modernizing our infrastructure as we work toward our goal of building the most resilient coastal grid in the country that will serve the energy needs of customers for years to come.”
– Jason Wells,
President and CEO of CenterPoint Energy

Phase One – Complete
In August 2024, we completed – ahead of schedule – the core resiliency actions of the first phase of the GHRI:
- Replaced more than 1,100 poles with stronger fiberglass poles that can withstand winds up to 132 miles per hour.
- Installed more than 300 automation devices that help reduce the impact of outages and help reduce restoration times for those who experience outages.
- Trimmed or removed high-risk vegetation – like limbs or trees that could fall during a storm and cause an outage – along more than 2,000 miles of power lines.
Phase Two: In Progress
Now through June 1, 2025, we are delivering on the second phase of the GHRI, which includes additional grid hardening, a year-round community preparedness and safety campaign and expanded partnerships with emergency response agencies in preparation for the 2025 hurricane season.
CenterPoint Energy is pursuing the boldest series of resiliency actions in our history, including system hardening, strategic undergrounding, installing self-healing grid technology and making further enhancements to our outage tracker. We are also implementing innovative technologies and using predictive modeling tools to inform resource planning and better prepare our assets in regions prone to extreme weather.
Our infrastructure investments during Phase Two are projected to total $550 million.

Long-Term Resiliency Plan
CenterPoint Energy is proposing to invest approximately $5 billion between 2026 and 2028 as we design, build and operate a more resilient electric grid – the largest investment in Greater Houston infrastructure in our company’s history. These enhancements will include:
- Hardening critical infrastructure
- Enhancing the security of the grid
- Building a smarter grid that can combat increasing extreme weather
These investments will help support our growing customer base as we work toward our goal of building the most resilient coastal grid in the country, reducing the impact of outages from storms and hurricanes.
By January 31, 2025, we will file a 2026-2028 Long-Term System Resiliency Plan with the Public Utility Commission of Texas. Our capital investment plan for CenterPoint Energy Houston Electric includes more than $21 billion in total capital investment from 2025 through 2030.
Spotlight on Resiliency: Hurricane Harvey
- 2017: Hurricane Harvey brought record-breaking rainfall, leaving our substations underwater for days, including our Memorial substation in West Houston.
- To serve customers in this hard-hit area, we constructed a temporary mobile substation on a church parking lot in seven days, enabling us to restore electricity to more than 9,000 customers.
- These learnings guided our efforts to make improvements to the reliability and resiliency of our infrastructure. We rebuilt the substation to withstand floods on a Harvey-scale by elevating the substation and equipment. We’re elevating and building flood walls around substations with a history of flooding and enabling them to withstand hurricane-level wind speeds.

Emergency Operations
CenterPoint Energy’s Emergency Operations Plan guides the company’s preparation, mitigation, response and recovery from an emergency. Our Emergency Preparedness and Response group supports our company’s emergency management program.
We take an all-hands-on-deck approach during an emergency response. Many employees shift from their regular functions during large restoration efforts to collaborate and coordinate on the company’s response. Crews work around the clock to assess system damage, repair equipment and restore power to our customers.
To improve our emergency response following Hurricane Beryl, we redeveloped an emergency preparedness and response communications playbook, which is especially focused on communicating earlier, more frequently and more widely throughout the storm cycle. Training, conducting drills, testing equipment and coordination are all important functions of our emergency response plans.
Our enhanced emergency response plans also include:
- A year-round public emergency preparedness and safety communications campaign with community outreach events, webinars and direct-to-customer outreach.
- A coordinated plan to strengthen our local partnerships with agencies and community partners critical to our emergency response efforts, including joint exercises on hurricane and hazard preparedness.
- Leveraging damage models to increase the proximity of staging site locations to hardest-hit areas and developing expanded staging site housing in strategic locations to deploy crews more quickly.
Additionally, we are implementing innovative technologies and using predictive modeling tools to inform resource planning and better prepare our assets in extreme weather-prone regions:
- Our collaboration with Technosylva, a global leader in wildfire science and extreme weather risk mitigation solutions, will utilize predictive analytics and artificial intelligence for more timely and accurate insights into threats to our infrastructure. The platform integrates high-resolution modeling, predictive analytics and real-time data to identify areas of concern and proactive steps to reduce outages.
- Our collaboration with Neara will utilize AI-enabled simulation and an analytics platform to support our electric resiliency efforts across the Greater Houston area. The platform and tools will inform our plans and actions before, during and after major weather events to help reduce the impact and duration of power outages.

Mutual Assistance
CenterPoint Energy is part of electric utility mutual assistance programs that provide access to thousands of linemen and tree trimmers from around the country to lend a hand during widespread power outage emergencies. Coming to the aid of other utilities is nothing new to our employees. Over the years, our crews have responded and restored power to hundreds of thousands of customers throughout the country who have been left in the dark following hurricanes, ice storms, tornadoes and severe thunderstorms.

Vegetation Management
Trimming and removing vegetation from our lines helps keep our customers and communities safe and reduces the number of potential outages related to vegetation. As part of the first phase of our GHRI, we’ve trimmed or removed higher-risk vegetation from over 2,000 power line miles. This work is crucial to helping reduce outages during storms and hurricanes.
We are refining risk-based vegetation management with a state-of-the-art predictive analytics model and AI technology to identify higher-risk vegetation across our system. We also use drones to conduct aerial inspections on overhead distribution circuits to help us identify equipment or vegetation-related issues that could create future outages.
Grid automation devices help reduce sustained outages caused by incidental contact, such as vegetation, wildlife or strong winds. Crews installed over 300 of these devices during the first phase of our GHRI, and another 4,500 are being installed in the second phase.
We work with Trees For Houston, a local nonprofit organization dedicated to planting, protecting and promoting trees, on our Plant Smart, Plant Safe program. The program helps educate communities on how to plant trees that are safe from power lines to help reduce the number of outages caused by tree interference. A grant from the CenterPoint Energy Foundation funds Trees For Houston’s education programs, projects and resources about the importance of planting and maintaining native species.

Spotlight: Avian Protection and Vegetation Management
CenterPoint Energy’s Environmental department maintains a robust avian protection program, taking great care to prevent harm to birds. In response to a recent report of an eagle’s nest near a distribution line in South Central Houston, our Bellaire Operations team will trim vegetation and install avian pole protection. For enhanced safeguarding, the team will hand-clear tree limbs around the nest and climb instead of using bucket trucks.
Customer Focus
We are dedicated to proactively delivering the important information our customers need, such as storm preparedness tips, safety information and real-time outage maps. Through our enhanced community education program, we are providing greater visibility into our emergency response and preparedness through more frequent communications and community engagements, as well as additional tools and resources.
In August and September 2024, our senior leadership team hosted community listening sessions in every one of the counties we serve in the Greater Houston area. We will continue to meet with our customers and listen to their feedback on how we can communicate more clearly and effectively, and we will act on their recommendations.


Some of the improvements we have made to deliver the services and experiences our customers expect and deserve include:
- Increased our call center capacity by 165 percent for storm events to reduce call wait times and provide a standard average speed of answer of five minutes or less.
- Updated our outage tracker to provide critical information before, during and after storms. The cloud-based, mobile-friendly tool can handle increased user traffic during a storm and is updated every 5 minutes. We held focus groups to hear directly from our customers on this relaunched tool and will continue to gather and evaluate feedback.
- Developed a plan to enhance the outage tracker with updates in Spanish and a mobile/web-based ability to report hazards.
- Scaled up capacity for our Power Alert Service that texts customers about outages and estimated restoration times and launched a campaign to increase enrollments.