CenterPoint Energy made public an independent expert report of its response to Hurricane Beryl, which included 77 recommendations designed to improve readiness, response and communications during future major storms and emergencies.
To date, because of the work associated with the Greater Houston Resiliency Initiative (GHRI) launched on August 5, CenterPoint has already completed, or is in the process of implementing, 51 of the 77 expert recommendations, and is assessing the remaining 26 recommendations to identify additional actions to benefit customers.
PA Consulting Group – a third-party consultancy with deep expertise in issues affecting utilities and other industries – conducted the independent review between July 31 and October 15, 2024. The review included an analysis of customer outage data, asset data, and internal and external communications provided by CenterPoint, and more than 30 interviews with key members of the CenterPoint team, including leadership.
"Following Beryl, we heard loud and clear the calls for change and are acting with urgency to address the challenges our customers faced. As part of our commitment to improve, we sought outside third-party experts to provide us with guidance and feedback, including from PA Consulting Group, a recognized expert in the utility industry. Their independent review is invaluable, and their recommendations will help us make the changes necessary to achieve our goal to build the most resilient coastal grid in the nation," said Jason Wells, President and CEO of CenterPoint.
Key Resiliency Actions: 18 Recommendations Already Completed
Following the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl, CenterPoint launched the first phase of GHRI, and completed all 40 actions ahead of schedule, on August 28. Because of this important work to address customer concerns during this hurricane season, CenterPoint has already completed 18 of the PA Consulting Group's recommendations, including:
- Replacing the public-facing Outage Map with an Outage Tracker featuring comparable capabilities to the previous version.
- Revising communication strategies to focus on delivering essential information to customers, including storm preparedness and expectations, while addressing key concerns like estimated restoration times.
- Utilizing the most effective channels to ensure clear and timely communication.
- Acquiring additional smaller generators, between 230 kW and 5 MW in size, to enable greater use of temporary generators during future events.
- Enhancing the coordination and optimization of vegetation resources and crews.
- Analyzing Beryl's restoration data (e.g., type of pole damage, pole reset durations) that is currently used in the damage prediction models to refine and enhance accuracy of the damage prediction model.
Key Recommendations: 33 In-Progress
CenterPoint launched the second phase of GHRI, which is designed to build on the progress made during the first phase and further improve overall resiliency, communications, and community coordination for the upcoming winter season and the 2025 hurricane season. As part of this effort, CenterPoint is in the process of implementing 33 of the report's recommendations, including:
- Vastly expanding the installation of TripSaver® (or similar) reclosers across the distribution system to help automate restoration for certain types of faults.
- Significantly increasing the use of composite poles across our service territory capable of withstanding stronger hurricane-force winds to improve system reliability and resiliency.
- Revising our tree trimming cycle to be more proactive and responsive to higher-risk vegetation, significantly reducing the risk of outages caused by overgrown vegetation interfering with power lines.
- Implementing a new storm management tool to increase efficiency in onboarding, tracking, deploying and utilizing out-of-state crews.
- Assessing benefits and costs of undergrounding in varying sections of the service territory, particularly where reliability has been concerning and other types of hardening will be ineffective.
- Increasing our call center capacity for storm events and re-training call center agents.
- Increasing the completeness of customer contact information to enhance restoration time communications during storm events through proactive enrollment in our Power Alert Service so that we can push out real-time updates to customers as information becomes available.
- Establishing regular engagement with key stakeholders, including local government officials, emergency management agencies, and community organizations to foster strong partnerships and information sharing – including conducting joint planning exercises to advance alignment and coordination during emergencies.
Additional Recommendations Under Evaluation
In addition to the items already being addressed, CenterPoint is also evaluating the 26 new ideas provided by PA Consulting Group, to assess what additional actions can be taken over the coming months as part of the second phase of GHRI, or as part of our long-term resiliency efforts that will be announced in January of 2025.
This includes evaluating:
- Enhancing the existing tree replacement program to reduce at-risk vegetation.
- Assessing the feasibility of having a customer communication solution that can both push alerts and receive reports from customers across multiple channels.
- Implementing a system to gather feedback from stakeholders regarding the effectiveness of communication and outreach strategies.
