4 things to know about the Houston power crisis

More than a quarter million people in and around Houston remained without power as of Monday after Hurricane Beryl hit the city last week — a crisis that has sparked political pressure from both sides of the aisle and drawn new attention to Texas’s troubled grid. 

Gov. Greg Abbott (R) is demanding answers from the state’s biggest power utility about what went wrong in the storm, which led to blackouts for nearly 3 million people across Southeast Texas for days. He has given CenterPoint until the end of the month to offer an explanation amid a broad lack of response from the utility.

“The communications component of CenterPoint is unacceptable,” Abbott told reporters Sunday. “Corrections are coming, whether they like it or not.”

Democratic lawmakers have called for scrutiny of the utility as well. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), sent a letter to the Department of Justice on Friday asking for a federal investigation of CenterPoint, which she argued has left hundreds of thousands of Houstonians in the dark after several weather disasters this year.

The outages in Beryl’s wake — and the political response — also represented something bigger: the return of the Texas grid as a political live wire, as climate change driven by the burning of fossil fuels turns the weather increasingly dangerous. 

Here’s what you need to know about the outages, their political fallout and why Houston is at the forefront of America’s climate crisis. 

How bad is the situation in Houston?

It has been a grim illustration of the tendency of crises to compound. 

Houston’s brutal summer saw heat indexes — the metric of how hot it feels in the shade — reach above 104 on Monday, with the penetrating Texas sun pushing that subjective temperature up by an additional 10-15 degrees.

That heat is bearing down on a population with a high degree of chronic medical problems, medical debt and food insecurity; limited worker protections; and — for hundreds of thousands — still no electricity. 

While about 90 percent of Harris County residents who lost power since last Monday have since had their power switched back on, a little under a quarter million households remain without power, according to CenterPoint — or, in human terms, the equivalent of the entire city of Sacramento, Calif.

Lack of electricity means no air conditioning, which is the chief technical innovation that drove Houston’s late-20th century boom and that makes the city habitable for residents who live there now.

Without air conditioning, residents slept in cars or drove around the region trying to find a hotel with vacancies — provided that they could afford a hotel, or had a car. About 7 percent of Harris County residents, or 334,000 people, don’t have access to an automobile.

That means emergency rooms are seeing twice as many hospital admissions as usual this year, and three times as many people as would typically be suffering from heat-related illness, according to The Associated Press.

Then there is food: No power also means no refrigeration, and — for those with electric appliances, or even many gas ones — no way to cook.

What caused the outages?

In the immediate sense, the reason millions of Southeast Texas residents went days without power is that Hurricane Beryl slammed into the Houston area last week, maintaining Category I strength for most of its passage over the city and doing at least $2.5 billion in damage from its winds alone.

With gusts of more than 80 mph, Beryl — which later weakened to a tropical storm — knocked down 10 major transmission lines into Houston, as well as an untold number of utility poles. 

“Beryl was mostly a wires issue,” Tom Overbye of Texas A&M University’s Smart Grid Center told Community Impact. “What I suspect happened is you have trees falling on distribution lines, and you also have higher wind knocking over some transmission towers and distribution towers as well.”

To make matters worse, Beryl arrived with an element of surprise: Projections showed landfall much farther south, but the storm took a hard right turn last Monday and ran up the coast before slamming its more powerful “dirty side” into Houston  — a city already reeling from major storms in May and June, each of which left hundreds of thousands without power.

For its part, CenterPoint has pointed to the storm’s surprising and protracted strength. “This hurricane moved over the entirety of our system, it didn’t brush by a portion of it,” CEO Jason Wells told The Houston Chronicle.

“We had contributing factors, weak trees over the past growing seasons. So it doesn’t really matter the distinction from a Category 1 or a Category 2. This was a hurricane that hit all of the greater Houston area, and we had to respond to that.”

In other messaging, CenterPoint noted that downed power lines aren’t the only reason for failures: The storm also damaged many households’ “weatherheads,” the port where electric lines enter the house, the company has observed.

But for many Houston residents, outside experts and state officials, pointing at the ferocity of Beryl itself — or the cumulative damage of the summer’s storms in general — provides only a partial answer.

“A cat 1 hurricane shouldn’t knock out your power system,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology hurricane researcher Kerry Emanuel told InsideClimate News. “I think you’ve got a problem with the power company, frankly.”

Why are residents, lawmakers criticizing CenterPoint?

In his interview with the Chronicle, Wells said he was “proud” of CenterPoint’s investments before the storm, and its quick work after.

The company’s investments in high-tension lines “operated as designed. We built our transmission structures to withstand extreme winds, and we had minimal damage to the transmission system,” he said.

Bringing back power to more than 1 million people “within effectively 48 hours of the storm’s passing is faster than what many of our peers have seen in the past 10 named storms,” he added. 

But a number of area residents and Texas lawmakers have criticized CenterPoint’s management of power lines prior to the storm, and the utility’s communication strategy in its aftermath.

Immediately after the storm, the Houston Chronicle’s editorial board published a blistering editorial criticizing the company’s short- and long-term preparation. One key issue raised by the board was the utility’s lack of transparency in whether it had proactively cleared trees — which in storms can become lethal to local power supplies — from power easements, maintenance activity some Houstonians told KHOU they had never seen.

Measuring by dollars per customer, CenterPoint’s spending on clearing up trees was second-to-last among the four major Houston-area utilities, according to KHOU. The company contends that its spending on tree trimming went up nearly a third between 2022 and 2023.

While the tree issue is complex, the Chronicle board argued, other failures were less forgivable — like the fact that the utility’s outage tracker had been down since the May thunderstorms, or that the company did not call in out-of-state linemen needed for repair until after the storm had passed, rather than bringing them in proactively.

“By now, Houstonians have set a pretty low bar for CenterPoint Energy,” the board wrote. “What we do expect from our power utility is transparency. Preparation. Resiliency.”

“It appears that CenterPoint failed on all counts.”

Residents waiting for their power to get turned on have reported long hold times or an inability to get in touch with CenterPoint representatives, who have announced plans to get the number of outages down to about 45,000 households by the end of the day Wednesday.

Many who have gotten a response haven’t liked what they heard. Houston residents posted to the social platform X apparent screen grabs of CenterPoint messages saying they would be without power until this Friday, July 19. 

Much of the anger residents directed toward CenterPoint in the storm’s wake was rooted in Houstonians’ past experiences with the utility as well — in particular Hurricane Ike in 2008, when more than 2 million spent nearly two weeks without power.

“I remember driving around to charge a flip phone and hearing Mayor White on [Houston Public Radio] essentially begging CenterPoint to hurry,” Allyn West of the Environmental Defense Fund wrote on X. “How has nothing changed in 16 years?”

In a later post, looking at two other trends since Ike — the inflation-driven one-third drop in the value of the dollar, and the 20 percent rise in days over 90 degrees — West concluded things, in fact, had changed in Houston: “They’ve gotten worse and more expensive.”

In a comment to The Hill, CenterPoint’s media relations team said the company was was “committed to working together with state and local government, regulators, and community leaders both to help the Greater Houston area recover from Hurricane Beryl and to improve for the future.”

“We are also committed to doing a thorough review of our response, supporting any external inquiries, and continuing to serve our customers and our communities, especially when they need us most.”

Other CenterPoint messaging has garnered further criticism. On-hold messages encouraged callers to buy generators from a partner company.

In her letter to the Department of Justice, Jackson Lee, a former Houston mayoral candidate, offered a list of company failures reported in local media, including the generator hold message, reports of workers “sitting idly in fully equipped trucks and not responding to calls” and pervasive “inconsistencies and inaccuracies” faced by customers seeking updates of when their power would be back on. “This is simply inexcusable for a company that has a fiduciary duty to its customers.”

She asked federal officials to investigate the company’s “inability to appropriately and effectively provide life-saving utility services its customers rely on.”

Jackson Lee warned that “without urgent action, and the threat of additional storms ahead, Texas could be on the verge of … deadly and costly mass casualties” driven by the combination of power failures and extreme heat.

Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R), who have broadly opposed federal oversight, called on the state’s own Public Utilities Commission (PUC) to look into whether CenterPoint was “penny-pinching and cutting corners.”

In an meeting of the PUC, Chair Thomas Gleeson (R) suggested CenterPoint’s great failure had been its outreach. 

“The infrastructure is gonna break; things are gonna happen,” Gleeson told CenterPoint officials. “But if people feel they’re being effectively communicated with, it makes it a lot easier to go through it. And so I’d say, get out in the community and go talk to your customers.”

For his part, Patrick had a harder series of questions. Over the weekend, he announced plans for the state Senate, which he presides over, to grill CenterPoint officials beginning in August. When that happens, Patrick wrote on X, officials would have to answer questions such as “Did they cut corners before the storm?”, “Are they cutting corners now?” and “are Houston and surrounding areas still IMPORTANT to CenterPoint?”

While Texans understand the unusual impacts of Beryl, Patrick wrote, “people have a right to be extremely frustrated with CenterPoint.”

Across Southeast Texas, he added, “people are suffering through terribly oppressive heat, a lack of food and gasoline availability, debris everywhere, and much more. The poor and most vulnerable are suffering the most.” 

What are experts and officials proposing to keep this from happening again?

Abbott is demanding CenterPoint tell him what it can do to prevent future crises by the end of the month — and he has said if the utility doesn’t come up with good answers, he will do so himself. One solution he has floated is breaking the company up. 

“It’s time to reevaluate whether or not CenterPoint should have such a large territory,” he said.

Some experts, meanwhile, are calling for infrastructure reform. Local meteorologists at Space City Weather urged the state and city to consider the sort of solutions they say “should have” been implemented after Ike: “concrete poles, underground lines, microgrids, and other ideas.”

These options are common in Northern cities that deal with snowstorms, such as Buffalo, as KHOU reported. But they are more logistically difficult in Houston, where the ground is swampy and increasingly flood-prone — and spiderwebbed with an often-uncharted mix of legacy gas pipes and fiber optic cables.

As The Texas Monthly reported last year, in 2021, PG&E proposed burying its overhead transmission lines, which had sparked the deadly Camp Fire — at a cost of $2.5 million per mile. 

Scale that over the CenterPoint network, and the cost would amount to $132 billion — more than 20 times the company’s 2023 annual profits. A more modest proposal reviewed by the Chronicle would have cost $29 billion in 2009, or about $50 billion today.

Burying cables is expensive because they have to be carefully insulated to keep power from surging through the ground — which isn’t a risk for airborne cables. “The earth is a conductor, and you can’t have the electricity going into the earth,” Texas A&M electrical engineering professor B. Don Russell told Click2Houston.

The cost of burying main transmission lines would be “exponentially” higher than doing so with the smaller-capacity neighborhood lines that supply homes, Russell added — costs he said the utility would likely pass on to consumers.

A sense of urgency hovers over the debate. Beryl was a stunningly early major storm in a season forecasters expect to be at or near-record levels — and it was only a Category 1 storm, though one uniquely placed to do maximum damage.

As Houstonia magazine reported, in a Category 2 storm, like Ike, the power might be off for a couple of weeks; a Category 3 storm, like 1983’s Alicia, could leave residents in the dark even longer. A Category 4 like the fearsome 1900 storm that wrecked Galveston, then Texas’s biggest city, would lead to “power outages [that] are expected to be complete and [that] could take months to restore.”

And climate change, driven largely by burning the products whose manufacture built Houston — fossil fuels — means those storms are only getting worse, and more frequent, in tandem with development advancing over the prairies and wetlands that would otherwise absorb their water and blunt their winds.

Beginning to reverse the process of neighborhood construction that has filled the floodplain with houses, University of Chicago historian Jonathan Levy wrote after 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, would cost an estimated $27 billion and require the city to appropriate and clear 10,000 structures currently in the 100-year floodplain.

A Houston native who grew up in one of the neighborhoods that would be cleared for flood-absorbing green space under such a plan, Levy argued that Houston was emerging as the capital of a broader American climate paradox: The city, he observed, is both made by, and being unmade by, the impacts of fossil fuels.

Finding the politics necessary to solve these problems “would seem impossible,” Levy wrote. “But on the planetary scale, much more dramatic and improbable efforts than this will likely be required.”

“If you have no politics for what to do with Houston, that is, then you have no politics for what to do about global warming,” he added.