Harris County escaped two recent arctic blasts with a relatively low number of power outages, due in part to extensive preparation from CenterPoint Energy and also because the storm just wasn\u2019t that bad, a utility company official said Wednesday.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Nathan Brownell, CenterPoint Energy\u2019s vice president of resiliency and capital delivery, said Winter Storm Fern<\/a> offered a much-needed opportunity for his team to rebuild trust with the 2.9 million customers who haven\u2019t forgotten 2021\u2019s Uri, which created a multi-week blackout with more than 246 deaths reported statewide.\u00a0<\/p>\n In contrast, about 30,000 customers lost power during last month\u2019s freezes. Most were restored in less than an hour, Brownell said.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe had areas that had icing and had wind and some extreme weather,\u201d he said. \u201cWas it rampant across our whole footprint? No, but some of our areas were impacted. Over the last couple of years, our team has spent almost 20,000 hours of training for extreme weather events. We enacted our Emergency Operations Center and we deployed that training. We were overprepared.\u201d<\/p>\n Since Hurricane Beryl in 2024, the utility company has installed more than 50,000 hurricane-resistant poles built to withstand extreme weather. They\u2019ve buried 400 miles of power lines underground and trimmed over 8,000 miles of high-risk vegetation. About 500 new automation devices have been added to monitor outages.\u00a0<\/p>\n Twelve rapid-response neighborhood service centers stood up across Houston last month so crews could get to the outages quickly and make repairs. About 3,000 employees, including contractors from other states, were part of the response effort.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re truly building this system to withstand all the risk that we see in the Houston area: high winds, flooding, wildfire, icing, hurricanes,\u201d Brownell said. \u201cIt\u2019s a very high-risk area, but we owe it to our customers and we\u2019re committed to delivering on the service they expect.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n CenterPoint collaborated with city and county officials during last month\u2019s weather events and publicized overnight warming centers that provided refuge for about 1,400 people, many of whom were homeless and wanted to get out of the cold \u2014 not necessarily families who were experiencing power outages.\u00a0<\/p>\n Brownell said frequently that CenterPoint is committed to building the most resilient coastal grid in the nation, but he acknowledged this week that the utility company is just the middleman for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages most of the state\u2019s power grid. ERCOT officials said<\/a> before last month\u2019s freezing weather that the electricity supply remained ahead of rising demand.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe are the distribution and transmission company. We don\u2019t generate any electricity here in the Texas market,\u201d Brownell said. \u201cOur role is to take the electricity from the generators and bring it to our customers. ERCOT governs those generators. They are working to understand which power plants are having maintenance issues and which ones are online or offline. They\u2019re forecasting the demand for the next day and checking to see how much capacity is on the market.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The problem during Winter Storm Uri, Brownell explained, was that there weren\u2019t enough generators. <\/p>\n \u201cThe demand was so high because of the extreme weather and there weren\u2019t enough generators online,\u201d he said. \u201cThat caused an imbalance. That\u2019s where customers didn\u2019t have power, because there weren\u2019t enough generators on the system. Our actual infrastructure \u2014 the poles and the wires \u2014 was fine. We were waiting for the power, but there wasn\u2019t enough power to send to the customers.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n After Uri, state law was changed to allow utilities to lease mobile generators for emergency use. CenterPoint agreed to lease a fleet<\/a> of 20 large generators, some of which require cranes and special permitting to move, at a cost of roughly $800 million. The utility company didn\u2019t use them during Beryl in 2024 because, executives said at the time, they weren\u2019t easily deployable in fast-breaking outages. <\/p>\n