Houston Is on a Path to an All-Out Power Crisis
6 min read
For the 2.2 million people in Houston who lost power Monday after Hurricane Beryl swept through the city, the first question they had was When will the electricity be back on? The city’s utility, CenterPoint Energy, didn’t yet have an online outage map to monitor. There was, however, a work-around. “The Whataburger app works as a power outage tracker,” tweeted a user who goes by the name BBQ Bryan, alongside a screenshot of the beloved local fast-food chain’s location map on its app. It did—helpfully, absurdly—track roughly to the city’s actual outages. Bonus points that it let folks know where to grab a Whatameal.
It was a frustrating and dissatisfying solution to what feels like a frustrating and dissatisfying situation Houstonians find themselves in—again. Houston bills itself as the energy capital of the world, as it is home to thousands of energy-related companies. Yet, in Texas-size irony, this is the third time this year that large stretches of the city have gone without power for multiple days.
The most troubling part is that Beryl wasn’t even that severe. It was a strong Category 1 hurricane, but it wasn’t as powerful a storm as Hurricane Ike, which, when it hit the city in 2008, was flirting with Category 3 status. (Ike left parts of the city without power for weeks.) And Beryl moved through quickly, unlike Hurricane Harvey, which parked itself over Houston for four days in 2017 and dropped several feet of rain. By Gulf hurricane standards, Beryl was pretty modest—and still, much of Houston is paralyzed. As of this afternoon, five days after the storm, 854,000 customers still have no power. CenterPoint did eventually release an outage map, and it’s a wild visual artifact. Much of the city and surrounding Harris County is highlighted blue, meaning those areas have been assessed and are waiting to be eventually “energized.” All this as summer temperatures push into the 90s, with “feels like” temps nearing or at triple digits.
Moderate storms like Beryl are concerning because they reveal just how fragile Houston’s power infrastructure has become. A fierce derecho hit the city on May 16, cutting off power for nearly 1 million customers. The devastation to the grid was most evident in alarming, widely shared photos of transmission lines toppled and bent like toy pipe cleaners. It took CenterPoint about a week to restore power to most of those affected customers. Then, two weeks later, on May 28, a severe thunderstorm hit the city with hurricane-force winds, knocking power out for 325,000. CenterPoint restored service in roughly two days. Beryl restoration efforts will take at least a week for some. By mid-afternoon today, the utility had returned power to roughly 1.4 million customers, and CenterPoint has said it’s aiming to “restore 80 percent of impacted customers by the end of day Sunday.”
These outages obviously mean no power for homes, a huge inconvenience at best and a deadly scenario at worst, but also businesses all over the city have lost millions of dollars and untold hours of productivity. Tons of food have been wasted, both from personal fridges and by local restaurants on slim margins that can probably bounce back from one outage, but maybe not three. Doctor’s appointments have been canceled, and medical treatments have been delayed. Traffic lights hang dead in the air, compounding car congestion in the country’s fourth-largest city. Each time the power goes out, lives get put on indefinite hold as people wait for their world to turn back on.
All of this and it’s just July. We’ve only hit B in hurricane naming conventions. We’re still weeks away from the most active hurricane months of August and September in what’s predicted to be an “above-normal season.”
Houstonians are, sadly, old hands at this. Lots of people have invested in generators—which have basically become an essential household appliance—to power things like fridges and fans and portable AC units. But there have even been issues in getting gas to fill those generators. Gas stations with no power mean inactive pumps. And with limited power in the city, cars are lined up 10, 20, 30 deep at the stations that are functioning. One writer at the Houston Chronicle waited three and a half hours to fill her tank. I saw some of this pandemonium firsthand on Tuesday, when I drove into the city from Austin to accompany my mom to a doctor appointment (that ended up being—surprise—canceled). On my way in, I stopped at a Buc-ee’s in Waller, Texas, about 25 miles outside Houston’s city limits. Buc-ee’s, another beloved Texas institution, this one a chain of gas stations known for shockingly enormous convenience stores and blessedly clean restrooms, is usually busy. But I had never seen anything like this. Nearly every one of its dozens of gas pumps was servicing a car as people circled the gigantic lot looking for open spots. Its multi-thousand-square-foot store was teeming with customers. People had driven for miles, just for gas and convenience and maybe a short reprieve in an air-conditioned building.
Five days into this mess, we’ve entered the part of the weather-disaster cycle where politicians, bureaucrats, and company executives are Spider-Man-memeing one another. A finger-pointing game has been playing out in the media between Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick (who is acting governor while Greg Abbott is traveling) and County Judge Lina Hidalgo over who reacted to what when. Meanwhile, most of the fire-and-brimstone rhetoric has been directed at CenterPoint. “Why did so many CenterPoint power lines and poles snap so easily? Why wasn’t the grid built stronger, and why wasn’t vegetation cut away?” the Chronicle columnist Chris Tomlinson recently lamented. Somebody tagged an I-10 underpass with the word CenterPointless, the s’s painted as dollar signs.
CenterPoint has defended its response to the storm by noting that “trees across the Greater Houston area also contributed heavily to the outages as they were vulnerable due to significant freezes, drought and heavy rain over the past three years.” It’s true that there have been multiple storms, including the devastating winter storm Uri in 2021, which greatly damaged trees and brush across the entire state. But, as many Houstonians have been shouting, CenterPoint and city officials have had years to deal with issues such as precarious trees and to bolster Houston’s infrastructure for an endless future of hurricanes. As cities across the world adapt to the climate crisis, Houston is looking like a worst-case scenario of what happens when infrastructure doesn’t evolve to meet the moment. Worse storms will come. Will the city be prepared?
I was born and bred in Houston. My parents and most of my extended family still live there, and I visit often. It’s a place I love dearly, and I’ve told people for years that Houston is America’s greatest city with the sort of arrogance that only a Texan can unabashedly muster. The case has been easy to make. Houston has cutting-edge medical centers, world-class museums, and a thriving culinary scene. It’s the most diverse city in the country, with an estimated 145 languages spoken there. It’s the birthplace of Beyoncé. But my confidence in this assertion is shaken. I’ve seen tweets from even the most committed Houstonians deliberating whether it’s time to move. Houston is an inventive, ingenious place. I want to have faith that the energy capital of the world can find a solution to keeping itself energized. Either way, hurricane season is just getting started.
