‘We were fully prepared’: CenterPoint responds to criticism over Hurricane Beryl impacts
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A CenterPoint Energy executive defended the utility’s preparation and response to Hurricane Beryl after the storm knocked out power to 2.6 million of the utility’s customers in Houston.
Speaking before the Houston City Council on Wednesday afternoon, Brad Tutunjian, CenterPoint Energy’s vice president of regulatory affairs, unpacked the scale of the utility’s response, which includes manually surveying 56,000 miles of power lines.
“CenterPoint has been providing electricity to this community for over 100 years. We have never seen an incident to this magnitude,” Tutunjian said.
“This is the largest outage in our history.”
Tutunjian said CenterPoint was “fully prepared” before Beryl made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane early Monday.
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The preparation process began in April, Tutunjian said, with staff tabletop exercises to revisit and sharpen storm response efforts. Later on, training exercises were conducted in the field with line crews. Days before the storm arrived, even while CenterPoint and forecasters did not anticipate a direct hit from the hurricane, the utility began requesting support from third-party vendors and mutual aid partners as a precaution.
CenterPoint crews began responding to storm damage by 3pm Monday. Mutual aid crews —those dispatched by other utilities to support the restoration effort — often take 2-3 days to begin work since it’s unsafe to bring in those resources before the storm passes, Tutunjian said.
Tutunjian commended CenterPoint’s ability to assemble a staging site for “thousands and thousands of lineman” within 14 hours, an accomplishment he hasn’t seen in 26 years with the utility. The sites act as temporary cities for crews, including operations, lodging, food and supplies.
“We were fully prepared. We were proactive,” Tutunjian said.
CenterPoint has faced sharp criticism for lacking an active customer power outage map in the aftermath of Beryl’s strike on Houston. Tutunjian said the utility’s outage map crashed after being inundated with data requests from “robots and third-party companies,” rendering the platform “unsalvageable.”
The outage communication gap left some customers to rely on fast food company Whataburger’s app. There are 127 Whataburger locations in Houston, according to Newsweek, meaning customers could attempt to get a clearer picture of which parts of the city had power and which areas still needed to be restored.
By Tuesday, CenterPoint had begun providing outage data on its website but was only able to provide information regarding the number of customers impacted across its full service territory. CenterPoint said it is working with a third-party vendor on a cloud-based outage map solution that should be available by next month.
“We are extremely disappointed ourselves that we don’t have (the outage map),” Tutunjian said. “We know the frustration. We’re trying to get the information as best as we can.”
While official estimates of the Beryl’s financial toll will take further evaluation, Tutunjian said costs will likely be in the hundreds of millions. During his comments to the Houston City Council, Tutunjian aimed to garner support for CenterPoint’s 3-year, $2.2 billion resilience filing, which was submitted to the Public Utilities Commission of Texas and municipal agencies in April.
Tutunjian said the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events require a heightened focus on resiliency, which has historically taken a backseat to reliability for utilities.
The resiliency plan calls for $376 million to harden the utility’s transmission system— the largest line item in the request, which also includes coastal resiliency upgrades, substation transformer fire protections, distribution circuit rebuilds, advanced ariel imagery tools and a targeted vegetation management programe.
In addition to the resiliency plan, CenterPoint has proposed pilot projects to explore the value of utility-scale microgrids in restoration efforts and a utility-funded City of Houston representative to oversee resiliency efforts. CenterPoint also wants to transition its SAP software to a cloud-based application.
“The world that we live in is always based on a reliability response and not a resiliency piece, and we recognize that with the changing climate… that needs to change,” Tutunjian said.
Originally published by John Engel on power-grid.com
