When Hurricane Beryl came ashore on the Texas coast in July 2024, it was a Category 1 storm by the time it reached Houston. It still knocked out power to 2.26 million CenterPoint Energy customers, according to the utility's own post-storm report, and restoration for many customers took more than a week during a period of intense heat. The outages became a political issue in Texas and led to investigations by the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the state legislature.
On January 31, 2025, CenterPoint filed its 2026 to 2028 Systemwide Resiliency Plan with the PUCT. The filing seeks approval for $5.75 billion of spending across 39 measures, made up of about $5.55 billion in capital investment and about $210 million in operations and maintenance. It is the largest single resiliency proposal the utility has made, and it will be one of the first big tests of the state's 2023 resiliency planning law, which allows utilities to file multi-year plans and seek cost recovery for approved measures.
What is in the plan
The plan's headline components are physical hardening of the distribution system. CenterPoint's overview proposes 111 miles of strategic undergrounding of overhead lines in areas with repeated outages, and the installation of about 130,000 stronger distribution poles designed to withstand higher wind loads. Other measures cover vegetation management, distribution automation that can isolate faults and reroute power, flood protection at substations, and upgrades to transmission structures.
The utility says the plan is expected to avoid outages for more than 500,000 customers if a storm similar to Beryl strikes again. That figure is the company's own modelling estimate and will be tested in the regulatory process, where intervenors including consumer groups and large industrial customers typically scrutinize both the cost and the claimed benefits.
The filing sits alongside a shorter-term program. Through 2024 and into 2025, CenterPoint has been carrying out what it calls the Greater Houston Resiliency Initiative, a set of immediate actions launched after Beryl that includes replacing poles, clearing vegetation, installing automated devices and deploying weather stations across its service area. The utility has said its target is to finish the critical actions in that program before the 2025 hurricane season.
Why Houston is a test case
Houston combines several features that make its grid sensitive to severe weather. The service territory is large and densely populated, much of the distribution network is overhead, and the region is exposed to hurricanes, tropical storms, flooding and intense heat. Beryl's damage came mainly from falling trees and broken poles on the distribution system rather than from failures of generation or high-voltage transmission. That is a common pattern in hurricane outages along the Gulf Coast, and it is the reason resiliency plans focus on poles, wires and vegetation.
The heat dimension adds pressure. Power restoration after Beryl took place during hot weather, and the health risks from prolonged outages in high heat were part of the public debate that followed. Summer temperatures in Houston are high in most years, which means any major outage between June and September carries those risks.
The cost question
The plan's cost will eventually flow into rates if approved. Texas law allows utilities to recover approved resiliency costs, and the PUCT must weigh the expected reduction in outages against the bill impact. The commission has several options. It can approve the plan as filed, approve a reduced version, or reject specific measures. Settlement talks among parties are common in Texas rate proceedings and often produce a smaller program than the original filing.
Undergrounding is typically the most expensive measure per mile. It removes lines from wind and tree exposure but can be vulnerable to flooding, and repairs to underground cables take longer. Utilities usually reserve it for targeted sections where overhead lines have failed repeatedly. The 111 miles in CenterPoint's proposal are small relative to the size of its overall distribution network, which is consistent with that targeted approach.
Stronger poles and automation are cheaper per unit and can be rolled out more widely. Automation in particular can shorten outages by isolating damaged sections and restoring power to the rest of a circuit, although it cannot prevent damage from falling trees.
What it means for the wider market
For energy markets, the CenterPoint filing illustrates a trend across US utilities exposed to extreme weather: spending on resilience is becoming a large component of distribution capital budgets, alongside spending to connect new load such as data centers and industrial facilities. Both drive rate base growth, and both compete for the same regulatory tolerance for bill increases.
Utilities in Florida, the Carolinas and California already run large storm hardening or wildfire mitigation programs approved by their regulators. Texas is newer to multi-year resiliency planning, and how the PUCT handles CenterPoint's plan will shape how other Texas utilities, including Oncor and AEP Texas, frame their own filings.
There is also a reliability dimension that touches the wholesale market. ERCOT, which runs the Texas grid, manages generation and transmission, but outages experienced by customers during storms are overwhelmingly distribution failures. Distribution resilience therefore does more to determine whether customers keep power during a hurricane than additional generation capacity does.
How other Gulf Coast utilities compare
Entergy, which serves Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas and parts of East Texas, has also filed multi-year resilience programs with its state regulators after repeated hurricane damage. Florida utilities have run storm protection plans under a 2019 state law, with annual filings that list hardening projects and their costs. Those programs offer a reference point for Texas regulators on what measures have reduced restoration times in later storms, and on the bill impact of large hardening budgets over several years.
What to watch
The PUCT has a statutory deadline to rule on resiliency plans, and the proceeding will run through the spring and early summer of 2025. Key points to follow are the final approved budget, which measures survive any settlement, the rate impact per residential customer, and whether the commission sets performance metrics that tie cost recovery to measured outage reductions.
The 2025 hurricane season begins on June 1. Whether the short-term initiative is complete by then, and how the grid performs in any storm that does arrive, will shape the debate over the longer plan. The broader lesson from Beryl for utilities elsewhere is that even a relatively weak hurricane can produce very large outages when it passes over a dense, tree-lined, overhead distribution network.