Harris County escaped two recent arctic blasts with a relatively low number of power outages, due in part to extensive preparation from CenterPoint Energy and also because the storm just wasn’t that bad, a utility company official said Wednesday.
Nathan Brownell, CenterPoint Energy’s vice president of resiliency and capital delivery, said Winter Storm Fern offered a much-needed opportunity for his team to rebuild trust with the 2.9 million customers who haven’t forgotten 2021’s Uri, which created a multi-week blackout with more than 246 deaths reported statewide.
In contrast, about 30,000 customers lost power during last month’s freezes. Most were restored in less than an hour, Brownell said.
“We had areas that had icing and had wind and some extreme weather,” he said. “Was it rampant across our whole footprint? No, but some of our areas were impacted. Over the last couple of years, our team has spent almost 20,000 hours of training for extreme weather events. We enacted our Emergency Operations Center and we deployed that training. We were overprepared.”
Since Hurricane Beryl in 2024, the utility company has installed more than 50,000 hurricane-resistant poles built to withstand extreme weather. They’ve buried 400 miles of power lines underground and trimmed over 8,000 miles of high-risk vegetation. About 500 new automation devices have been added to monitor outages.
Twelve rapid-response neighborhood service centers stood up across Houston last month so crews could get to the outages quickly and make repairs. About 3,000 employees, including contractors from other states, were part of the response effort.
“We’re truly building this system to withstand all the risk that we see in the Houston area: high winds, flooding, wildfire, icing, hurricanes,” Brownell said. “It’s a very high-risk area, but we owe it to our customers and we’re committed to delivering on the service they expect.”
CenterPoint collaborated with city and county officials during last month’s weather events and publicized overnight warming centers that provided refuge for about 1,400 people, many of whom were homeless and wanted to get out of the cold — not necessarily families who were experiencing power outages.
Brownell said frequently that CenterPoint is committed to building the most resilient coastal grid in the nation, but he acknowledged this week that the utility company is just the middleman for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages most of the state’s power grid. ERCOT officials said before last month’s freezing weather that the electricity supply remained ahead of rising demand.
“We are the distribution and transmission company. We don’t generate any electricity here in the Texas market,” Brownell said. “Our role is to take the electricity from the generators and bring it to our customers. ERCOT governs those generators. They are working to understand which power plants are having maintenance issues and which ones are online or offline. They’re forecasting the demand for the next day and checking to see how much capacity is on the market.”
The problem during Winter Storm Uri, Brownell explained, was that there weren’t enough generators.
“The demand was so high because of the extreme weather and there weren’t enough generators online,” he said. “That caused an imbalance. That’s where customers didn’t have power, because there weren’t enough generators on the system. Our actual infrastructure — the poles and the wires — was fine. We were waiting for the power, but there wasn’t enough power to send to the customers.”
After Uri, state law was changed to allow utilities to lease mobile generators for emergency use. CenterPoint agreed to lease a fleet of 20 large generators, some of which require cranes and special permitting to move, at a cost of roughly $800 million. The utility company didn’t use them during Beryl in 2024 because, executives said at the time, they weren’t easily deployable in fast-breaking outages.
The demand for electricity is constantly rising as people and businesses move to Texas. Data centers have strained the grid but they also add value in tax revenue and job creation, Brownell said.
On a “blue-sky day” like Wednesday, CenterPoint employees don’t take a break, Brownell added. They’re out trimming trees and installing poles.
“We will get hit by another hurricane at some point,” he said. “Every day that we have the opportunity, we’re going to be working hard to build the most resilient coastal grid in the nation. We heard a lot from our customers about their frustrations and we’ve been laser-focused on re-earning our customers’ trust and meeting their expectations. In our minds, one outage is too many.”
This article appears in Private: Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2026.