Hurricane Beryl left more than 2.26 million of CenterPoint Energy’s 2.6 million Houston-area customers without power amid Texas’s unrelenting midsummer heat. More than 500,000 are expected to remain without power for more than a week after the storm. All eyes are now on the region’s monopolistic energy distributor.
In the weeks leading up to the storm, forecasts for the Houston area projected a mild tropical storm with heavy rain and minor inconveniences. But as the storm neared Texas’s south coast on the evening of Sunday, July 7, the cone of uncertainty shifted further north, placing Houston squarely, as Mayor John Whitmire put it, on the “dirty side of a dirty storm.”
At a press conference on Tuesday, when the heat index reached 105, a CenterPoint representative was asked how long it would take to restore power. “I can’t give you a timeline, but it’s not gonna be tomorrow,” he said.
The meltdown has been as much a crisis of communication as of operation. On Thursday, more than 1 million customers were still without power or even a restoration timeline, leaving it unclear if they should flee town or wait in the punishing heat for the air conditioners to come back on.
Houston-area CenterPoint customers went through a similar situation in May, when a windstorm left nearly 1 million customers powerless. The energy distributor has yet to explain why these protracted outages keep happening and what improvements, if any, it has made to prevent future disruptions.
Government officials are taking notice. Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has been serving as acting governor throughout the disaster (Governor Greg Abbott is in Taiwan on a business-development trip). At a press conference, Patrick said CenterPoint will have to answer for its Hurricane preparedness, and that his response will depend on the contents of a full report he expects to receive from the company. State representative Lacey Hull, chairwoman of the Harris County delegation, led calls in the Texas House for a report on CenterPoint’s “preparation, response, and restoration recovery efforts surrounding Hurricane Beryl as well as the derecho storm that affected our region in May of this year.” Harris County attorney Christian Menefee has been critical, too, posting on X that “Centerpoint is failing to keep its customers informed after Hurricane Beryl.”
CenterPoint is a monopoly. Customers have no direct way to hold the firm accountable. The Texas Public Utility Commission (PUC) granted it the exclusive right to distribute energy in the Houston area, and CenterPoint spends lavishly to maintain the privilege. According to Transparency USA, in 2024 so far, CenterPoint has spent as much as $4.5 million lobbying the same state officials tasked with regulating it. It also invests heavily on the local level to maintain its influence. In 2022, it donated $2.8 million to sponsor the Houston Mayor’s Complete Communities initiative; it sponsored the Houston Climate Action Plan; and gave $1 million to the mayor’s energy assistance program for low-income residents. The newly appointed chair of the region’s metropolitan transportation agency works full-time as CenterPoint’s vice president of utility infrastructure planning and policy; she also served on the host committee for former mayor Sylvester Turner’s 2023 State of the City address and was one of two co-chairs for his 2022 State of the City address. CenterPoint, in other words, is well connected, and the amount it spends on lobbying and public relations goes far.
But now the calls for accountability are growing, and the Texas House State Affairs Committee has scheduled a July 31 hearing on the issue. Since Houstonians at present have no recourse in the free market, they must look to their elected and appointed officials to ensure that CenterPoint starts feeling some heat.
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