The breakdown
Following Hurricane Beryl's landfall last July, CenterPoint Energy received backlash from residents, business and local government officials due to delayed restoration times and communication issues as roughly 2.2 million residents went without power for several days. The delays prompted an investigation into the utility company by the Texas Legislature and the Public Utility Commission of Texas, leading to a yearlong effort by the company to revamp its procedures, equipment and real-time communication which aims to wrap up by June 1, according to prior Community Impact reporting.
However, despite a number of changes made by CenterPoint in the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl, township Intergovernmental Relations Director Todd Stephens said the issue of grid reliability is still of concern to The Woodlands area as electric vehicle charging stations and data centers, which power artificial intelligence, become more prevalent in the area.
"The Legislature has been focused on improving grid capacity, grid reliability and making sure we have sufficient power, obviously, to meet the needs to respond to other times," Stephens said. "You obviously have the needs of the response and preparedness that we experienced as a result of the storm, but then you also have the coming need for increased data centers and significantly increased amounts of energy that it takes to power AI."
Stephens said there are still over 70 bills moving through the Legislature that involve grid reliability and address issues such as:
- Vegetation management near power lines
- Storm-resilient power pole installation
- Outage tracking information
In their words
Board members expressed optimism about the changes made by CenterPoint Energy, noting that communication with residents regarding outages was one of the most important issues they wanted to see resolved.
"From my experience talking residents and business owners, they see a drastic difference," board Chair Brad Bailey said. "I will take my hat off as someone that was very critical of CenterPoint after the storm, they have done a monumental job of trying to address a lot of the concerns and open up lines of communication that really weren't there before."
Board members Cindy Heiser and Shelley Sekula-Gibbs also said they wanted to ensure residents were able to access regularly updated information during an outage as well as information available regarding the outage cause and estimated restoration times. Stephens said these issues were also being discussed by the Legislature.
