Our Path to Becoming the Most Resilient Coastal Grid in the Country

In August 2024, CenterPoint Energy launched the Greater Houston Resiliency Initiative as part of a company-wide commitment to build the most resilient coastal grid in the country. Our entire team is working every day to strengthen the grid for our customers, and we’ve made significant progress to date, including immediate improvements made ahead of schedule in GHRI Phase One and additional resiliency actions in GHRI Phase Two to prepare for the 2025 hurricane season.

Building on this progress, on Jan. 31, 2025, we submitted an enhanced 2026-2028 Systemwide Resiliency Plan – the largest single investment in resiliency in CenterPoint’s history. The plan will bolster our normal operations and improvements to help the Greater Houston area prepare for and mitigate the impacts of extreme weather and storms, as well as expand its capacity to meet future energy demands.

 

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Click here to read the Plan Overview

Click here to read the Plan Factsheet

Key actions and improvements

How will these improvements benefit customers?

These actions will expand on the significant progress made since launching GHRI in August 2024 to strengthen the grid and reduce the frequency and impact of outages for our customers. Once completed, these wide-ranging resiliency measures are expected to provide a series of important customer benefits, including:

• Reducing Outage Impacts: Reducing extreme weather-related power outages by over 1.3 billion minutes into 2029.
• Strengthening Overall Resiliency: Improving systemwide resiliency by 30% for all our customers.
• Meeting Future Energy Demand: Expanding the capacity of our system to meet our region’s population growth (by the size of Waco, Texas, each year) and rising energy demand.
• Reducing Community Costs: Saving on storm-related costs of approximately $50 million per year.
• Improving Major Storm Resiliency: Avoiding outages for more than 500,000 customers in the event of another Beryl-like storm.
• Automation Devices: 100% of lines that provide power to most of our customers will include devices capable of self-healing to reduce the impact of outages.
• Secure Substations: 99% of substations will be elevated above the 500-year flood plain.
  
• Stronger Distribution Poles: 130,000 stronger, more storm-resilient poles (rated to 110 mph and 132 mph) will be installed new, or replaced or braced to withstand stronger storms.
• Undergrounding: More than 50% of the system will be undergrounded to improve resiliency.
• Vegetation Management: Deploying an industry-leading, three-year vegetation management cycle, with 100% of power lines cleared of hazardous vegetation every three years.
• Stronger Transmission Towers: 2,200+ transmission structures will be rebuilt or upgraded to be able to better withstand extreme weather while improving overall reliability.
• Modernized Cables: 34,500 spans of underground cables will be modernized to reduce the frequency and impact of outages.

Additional Resources

• To view the full Systemwide Resiliency Plan, click here.​
• For the Systemwide Resiliency Plan Fact Sheet, click here​.
  

For more information on previous work conducted as part of the Greater Houston Resiliency Initiative, visit CenterPointEnergy.com/TakingAction.​​​​​​​​​​