Rebuked for outages, Houston utility taps AI tools for resilience

Scorned by customers and regulators for prolonged outages tied to Hurricane Beryl, Houston-based CenterPoint Energy is turning to a pair of artificial intelligence tools to improve resilience.

The utility, which serves 7 million customers in Indiana, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Ohio, and Texas announced collaborations with wildfire and extreme weather monitoring software provider Technosylva and Neara, an asset modeling platform.

Both companies boast AI capabilities to improve system reliability and resilience. The partnership with Technosylva is a memorandum of understanding, while the Neara announcement appeared to be a firm contract to support CenterPoint’s operations in Houston.

CenterPoint will leverage Technosylva’s extreme weather risk predictive analytics and mitigation solutions throughout CenterPoint’s entire network and will focus on an all-weather hazards approach. The collaboration is part of CenterPoint’s $21 billion commitment over the next five years to electric and natural gas resilience initiatives, including improved reliability and system modernisation.

Technosylva’s risk monitoring platform integrates high-resolution modeling, predictive analytics, and real-time data to offer actionable insights into extreme weather events and threats to network assets. The company’s software performs hundreds of millions of extreme weather simulations daily to generate current and near-term risk forecasts available in real-time, allowing its customers to predict and identify areas of concern and proactive steps to reduce outages.

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“As utilities work to harden the power grid for increasingly common extreme weather events, it’s critical they have the most accurate and timely intelligence possible to plan, prepare and protect their networks to be able to keep the lights on for their customers,” said Technosylva CEO Bryan Spear said.

Through the partnership with Neara, CenterPoint will deploy Neara’s AI capabilities across its 5,000-square-mile Greater Houston service area. Neara’s AI-enabled simulation and analytics platform is expected to help CenterPoint reduce customer outages and accelerate restoration efforts across its system.

“Understanding how weather scenarios and their risks could affect our operations will position us to be several steps ahead on our preparedness and response,” CenterPoint CEO Jason Wells said.

Neara’s technology will also support CenterPoint’s ongoing efforts to address higher-risk vegetation along power lines, as well as identify critical equipment upgrades, including pole replacements or reinforcements, quickly and efficiently. Additionally, Neara’s predictive technology will help CenterPoint prioritise specific assets and locations where grid hardening improvements will help optimise system-wide benefits. As targeted system upgrades are completed, CenterPoint will be able to quantify performance increases at the individual asset level and forecast, deliver and measure resilience improvements.

In July, CenterPoint Energy apologised to customers and regulators for its response to Hurricane Beryl, which left more than 2 million people without power, some for several days.

Hurricane Beryl’s toll on CenterPoint’s power grid in Houston forced utility crews to mitigate 35,000 downed trees, which faced “already poor soil conditions” before the storm. Two of CenterPoint’s most publicised shortcomings during the Hurricane Beryl response involved the response times of internal and mutual assistance utility crews and poor customer communication, including the unavailability of its customer outage map.

Executives had previously told local leaders they were “fully prepared” for Hurricane Beryl by pre-positioning crews, quickly standing up temporary response staging sites, and dispatching crews as soon as the storm had passed.

In a letter to lawmakers, CenterPoint proposed a roughly $5 billion investment toward grid resiliency in the Houston area. This includes removing vegetation around power lines, along with system hardening, advanced automation, predictive modeling, and further actions to improve preparedness and communication ahead of winter and the 2025 hurricane season.

Originally published by John Engel on power-grid.com