Dive Brief:
- CenterPoint Energy has acquired generators sized between 230 kW and 5 MW to help restore power during future grid outages, the utility said Friday. Larger generators were of little use following Hurricane Beryl in July, which led to widespread criticism of its storm preparations.
- PA Consulting Group published a third-party assessment of CenterPoint’s Beryl preparation and recovery efforts last week. Its 77 recommendations included for the utility to acquire smaller emergency generation units. CenterPoint says it has completed or is in the process of implementing 51 of the recommendations and is assessing the remaining 26.
- Following the storm, CenterPoint launched a $5 billion Greater Houston Resiliency Initiative to improve the local distribution system. “We heard loud and clear the calls for change and are acting with urgency,” utility President and CEO Jason Wells said in a statement.
Dive Insight:
Despite making dozens of recommendations for CenterPoint to improve its storm posture, PA Consulting’s analysis found the utility’s handling of Beryl to be on par with its peers.
CenterPoint’s preparation and response to Hurricane Beryl “were found to be generally consistent with industry standards, and its overall restoration time was comparable to its neighboring utilities,” the report concluded. It pointed to examples where the utility’s preparations, such as its acquisition of mutual assistance resources and the rapid deployment of staging sites and associated logistics, minimized recovery times.
Beryl “caused extensive damage” to CenterPoint’s electric infrastructure, primarily impacting the utility’s distribution system, according to the after-action report. The transmission system “proved resilient.”
The storm’s impact intensified as it hit Houston’s most densely populated service areas, and resulted in a high number of tree falls, many from outside utility easements, the report said. More than three-quarters of CenterPoint’s overhead distribution circuits experienced lockouts, and about 2.1 million customers were left without power.
Storm restoration took 11 days, which PA Consulting noted “was significantly shorter than the 17 days required for the company to restore power after Hurricane Ike [in 2008] and on par with peers during Hurricane Beryl.” About 78,000 CenterPoint customers were still without power after eight days after Beryl, the report noted.
Customer sentiment “declined from before the storm to after its impact,” PA Consulting added. “This negative feedback primarily arose from the communication challenges CenterPoint encountered throughout the storm.”
PA Consulting’s review “is invaluable,” said Wells. “Their recommendations will help us make the changes necessary to achieve our goal to build the most resilient coastal grid in the nation.”
CenterPoint said it has already completed 18 of the consulting firm’s recommendations. The utility has replaced its public-facing outage map with an improved tracker; revised communication strategies to focus on delivering essential information to customers; and acquired “additional smaller generators, between 230 kW and 5 MW in size, to enable greater use of temporary generators during future events,” it said.
Criticism of CenterPoint’s storm response included its emergency generation resources, most notably the decision to lease 32-MW generators that were not deployed post-Beryl due to their size. The large units “are used for transmission events such as load shed or loss of substation events,” PA Consulting noted. “These larger generators were not compatible with the types of sites that were requesting temporary generation; none of these were deployed during Hurricane Beryl.”
CenterPoint said it also is “in the process of” implementing 33 other recommendations from the report, including expanding the use of automatic reclosers across its distribution system to help automate restoration and increasing the use of composite poles capable of withstanding stronger hurricane-force winds. The utility said it is also revising its tree-trimming cycle “to be more proactive and responsive to higher-risk vegetation.”
CenterPoint said it is evaluating 26 additional recommendations from PA Consulting Group, “to assess what additional actions can be taken over the coming months ... or as part of our long-term resiliency efforts that will be announced in January of 2025.”
Recommendations under consideration include enhancing CenterPoint’s tree replacement program, assessing the feasibility of a customer communication solution that can both push alerts and receive reports from customers across multiple channels, and implementing a system to gather feedback regarding the effectiveness of the utility’s communication.
