CenterPoint's $5.75 Billion Resiliency Filing Puts a Price on Houston's Hurricane Exposure
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. 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.
The utility says the plan is expected to avoid outages for more than 500,000 customers if a storm similar to Beryl strikes again. 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. Stronger poles and automation are cheaper per unit and can be rolled out more widely.
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. Utilities in Florida, the Carolinas and California already run large storm hardening or wildfire mitigation programs approved by their regulators. 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. The PUCT has a statutory deadline to rule on resiliency plans, and the proceeding will run through the spring and early summer of 2025.