Meeting the
Evolving Needs
of Our Customers
Large Customers
CenterPoint Energy’s goal is to be a company that is easy to do business with, provides comprehensive energy solutions for customers, drives internal business efficiencies, and captures growth opportunities across residential, commercial and industrial customer classes.
One of the core elements of our strategy is a 2021-2025 capital investment plan of more than $16 billion, a $3 billion increase over our prior capital plan. Our capital investment plan prioritizes safety, optimizes our service for customers, and minimizes regulatory lag in the recovery of our investments. Not only do we have outstanding organic growth opportunities in our utility businesses, but we also have the need to invest in the reliability and resiliency of our existing infrastructure to better serve our customers.
The Houston port area, which includes the world’s largest petrochemical complex, refining industries and global LNG export facilities, is experiencing unprecedented investment and increased energy needs. We are anticipating increased load demand across our system over the next three to five years to accommodate their continued investment and development needs. We are continuing to work with industrial and manufacturing customers across our service territory to identify their needs for increased safety, reliability and cleaner sustainable investments. In addition, we are working to help our residential and commercial customers reduce emissions attributable to their use of natural gas as part of our goal to achieve a 20-30% reduction in Scope 3 end-use emissions by 2035.
Resilient Now is a transformative initiative to enhance electric and natural gas resilience and promote the transition to sustainable energy.
The City of Houston – one of CenterPoint Energy’s largest customers – and CenterPoint Energy recently announced Resilient Now, a first-of-its-kind collaborative framework to develop a regional master energy plan to enhance local power resilience across the greater Houston area.
The collaboration is designed to optimize infrastructure investments and advance new energy solutions to address the challenges of increasingly frequent and disruptive weather events, while building the blueprint for a sustainable future to support increased electric transportation and the use of more renewable energy sources. As part of the master energy plan, the public-private collaboration will develop programs to advance residential weatherization and economic development in vulnerable communities.
CenterPoint Energy is hosting Customer Advisory Council meetings to engage our large customers, business and community leaders in our company’s role in a more resilient Houston.
The Council’s feedback guides how we can help support customers’ expectations regarding resiliency, reliability and a cleaner energy future with a focus on Resilient Now. This insight will help guide our methodology and resiliency investments in order to continue to build a smarter, more resilient Houston by continuously improving our support of critical infrastructure. The first two Customer Advisory Council meetings focused on resiliency with panelists discussing key topics, objectives and the significance of addressing the needs of vulnerable communities and businesses by working together.
Piloting End-Use Carbon Capture and Recycling for Commercial Customers
In Minnesota, we are testing an innovative technology that captures carbon dioxide from business customers’ natural gas equipment and converts it into a safe, nontoxic powder that can be reused in commercial products, such as soap and glass. This innovative end-use carbon capture technology will help our commercial customers increase heating efficiency, lower energy costs and reduce the environmental impact of their energy use.