CenterPoint Energy has clocked good response times during back-to-back ice events earlier this year and heavy rain, thunder and lightning last weekend — but the true test of the electric grid may be when 500,000 guests come to town for the World Cup this summer.
Jason Fabre, CenterPoint’s vice president of special response, said preparations for the World Cup, slated for June 14-July 4 with seven matches at Houston’s NRG Stadium, include hazard mitigation inspections, grid resiliency work, field reviews, and natural gas and electric infrastructure inspections.
Crews are also patrolling the areas around NRG, practice sites, airports, Texas Medical Center and East Downtown to stop unauthorized digging. An emergency preparedness response team is creating action plans and staffing logs and working with FIFA as well as local government and law enforcement to ensure a coordinated response.
Fabre said that, in simple terms, what all that means is that they’re making sure that there’s no heavy vegetation around power lines and keeping maintenance up to date, particularly in the areas where guests will be coming and going.
Grid capacity is an ERCOT matter, Fabre said, but resiliency is CenterPoint’s responsibility. “We don’t have any concerns about the ability of our system to service events,” he said. “We’ve had Super Bowls and World Series games with a lot of fans and hotels. restaurant and airport usage.”
“The rodeo is going on right now, so we had to make preparations for that,” he added. “The Rockets are playing. We’re getting ready for the Astros to start playing again. All of those activities require that we pay special attention to different portions of our system. We started about six months ago doing hazard assessments for the World Cup. I would say the heavy lift of the things that we’ve identified as concerns will be completed by early May.”
In the meantime, CenterPoint is staying staffed up for pop-up thunderstorms, including one that could hit the Houston area on Wednesday. About 1,400 frontline workers are ready to respond to outages, Fabre said.
Over the past two years, CenterPoint has installed 59,000 storm-resilient poles, buried 400 miles of power lines underground, trimmed more than 8,000 miles of high-risk vegetation and added 500 automation devices to monitor outages.
The “FIFA footprint” wasn’t necessarily included in that work, so they’ve expanded the area where improvements are being made, Fabre said. “We’re taking a look at the electric systems to ensure that they’re ready to serve all of the fans that will be coming in and all our local customers.”
CenterPoint officials acknowledge that it’s a big responsibility to “power every moment” of the biggest sporting event in the world.
Fabre said he’s confident the grid can handle a surge in use. NRG is currently packed with visitors in town for the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. The airports are overwhelmed with spring breakers trying to get to their destinations on time amid three-hour backups in security lines due to a partial government shutdown. Houston’s grid has proven it can handle lots of people, he said.
But outages occur when the weather takes a turn.
More than 30,000 CenterPoint customers lost power during Winter Storm Fern in late January, which brought icy rain to the Greater Houston area. Accumulated freezing rain can cause lines to snap or tear down supporting poles, and ice-laden tree branches can fall onto the power lines. During the winter storms, CenterPoint averaged about an hour in getting the lights back on for those who lost power.
At the time, CenterPoint Vice President of Resiliency and Capital Delivery Nathan Brownell said the successful response was due in part to extensive preparation after mistakes were made in previous Houston-area weather events.
The utility company infamously didn’t use 20 large backup generators, which it paid $800 million for, during 2024’s Hurricane Beryl, saying at the time that the machines weren’t easily deployable during fast-breaking outages. CenterPoint also came under fire for not communicating well with customers during Winter Storm Uri in 2021, when people said they had to use Whataburger’s mobile app to track outages when CenterPoint’s online system went down.
Fabre acknowledged that CenterPoint is still run, for the most part, by humans and there are people in the Greater Houston area who are dissatisfied with the service. However, they’ve made huge improvements in recent years, he said.
“We’ve made commitments to have the most resilient coastal grid in the country,” he said. “There are lots of things that come with that. It’s a wide range of things we have to work on to restore our customers’ confidence.”
“We’re continuously learning from past events,” he added. “When you go through an after-action review, there are always positives and negatives and things that can change. I think communication is one of the things we heard from our customers. How we actually operate is another one.”
Fabre said he couldn’t speak to specific instances of a customer being told a technician would arrive on site within a particular window and that didn’t happen, but he noted that in 2025, customer outage restoration times dropped 100 million minutes from the previous year.
The region was again threatened with severe weather last weekend, prompting Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to stage swift water rescue boats and other resources across the state. Houston got heavy rain, lightning and thunder, and about 83,500 customers lost power. Again, the average restoration time was about an hour. As of Tuesday morning, everyone affected by the weekend outage had been restored, Fabre said.
CenterPoint is planning for more severe weather on Wednesday, and they’ve activated an incident command post that Fabre is overseeing. Space City Weather meteorologist Eric Berger says his best guess is that scattered showers and “perhaps a few thunderstorms” will hit Houston on Wednesday morning.
“None of these is likely to be too serious, and I expect daytime highs to approach about 80 degrees,” Berger wrote on his blog. “Shortly after noon, a more organized line of storms is likely to approach the area from the west, and this should move through the city during the afternoon hours before exiting by early evening.”
Bria Bolden, a CenterPoint media specialist, pointed out that heavy winds are anticipated, and although that kind of weather doesn’t keep people from traveling or cause school closures, it can definitely knock out a utility pole.
Fabre said CenterPoint activated its incident command structure on Tuesday, using predictions from staff meteorologists “to make very careful calculations on the resources needed to restore our customers,” he said. “This is not a hurricane but we’re planning for all hazards regardless of whether it’s a low-severity thunderstorm or any event that could potentially impact our system.”
CenterPoint customers are encouraged to sign up for Power Alert Service to receive outage details and customer-specific restoration updates via call, email or text. Customers can also follow Outage Tracker for information by county, city and ZIP code.