HOUSTON – With millions of Houston customers going days without power, all eyes remain on CenterPoint Energy as they anxiously wait for the lights to get turned back on. That’s why KPRC 2 reporter Gage Goulding sat exclusively with an executive member to try and get some clarity.
According to Jason Ryan, Executive Vice President of Regulatory Services and Government Affairs, power outages from Hurricane Beryl in the Houston area are historic for CenterPoint.
This was also fueled by “unprecedented extreme weather,” meaning not just Beryl - but freezes, drought, and rain that have all contributed to conditions that caused debris (entire trees and limbs) to bring down or damage power lines.
Ryan said the amount of help they brought in was unprecedented too. On Wednesday, 11,000 workers were out on 16-hour shifts, restoring power and making repairs.
As one of the millions of customers, who also do not have power, Ryan expects the company to reach its goal of restoring power for one million customers by the end of Wednesday, as promised.
What’s up with the outage tracker?
During May’s derecho, CenterPoint Energy’s outage tracker crashed with more than 900,000 outages, but the company told everyone a new, better tool was coming. It launched Tuesday night as a “restoration tool.”
“So the outage tracker map that we put up, last night is still a temporary fix that shows kind of in groups where you are in our restoration process. We will update that map three times a day at noon, at 4 p.m., 8 p.m.,” Ryan said.
Starting Thursday, CenterPoint will also give customers estimated restoration times. That should help us all get a better handle on how long it will take to get power restored to most folks.
“But we are bringing a completely new, outage tracker map that will be able to withstand the significant traffic that we saw during the derecho,” Ryan said. “So that’s why we came up with the outage map that we put out yesterday. We will continue to refine the information on that map and provide estimated restoration times starting tomorrow.”
“It was that significant traffic on the map that brought that site down,” he continued. “We knew if we put that same site back up, it would not meet customer expectations this go-around either.”
The new outage tracker was supposed to be ready by the end of this month, but Ryan didn’t have a date for the rollout.
Shortly after the interview made the air, CenterPoint reached its goal. However, more than a million customers were still without power in the Houston metro area Wednesday night after Hurricane Beryl’s destructive wind.
Transcript from the full interview:
Gage Goulding: Thank you so much. I know you’re incredibly busy. You and your entire team. On behalf of Houston, we thank you for all the hard work the men and women here at CenterPoint are doing. First and foremost, how are you and your team? Is everybody okay and safe?
Jason Ryan: We are. And you know, I want to start out by thanking our customers for their patience. We’re about 48 hours since the hurricane left the greater Houston area. And our team has performed well. We’ve had no serious injuries or fatalities. Very proud of that. Especially with the more than 10,000 additional resources that we brought in from other utilities. They’re not used to being in Houston. they’re working in dangerous conditions. And so, the men and women in the field are safe and super proud of them.
Gage Goulding: And that’s a staggering number. So let’s start there. I met, I think, of a crew as far away from Wheeling, West Virginia that I, whenever I was out and I worked in Wheeling, West Virginia, many moons ago. And I was just so shocked that they were here so quickly. And I believe the number was 12,000 people out working to restore power. Have you ever had an activation of that size before, or is this kind of historic proportions, if you will.
Jason Ryan: So we’ve never had this many customers out from a storm before. 2.26 million customers out at the height of the storm. so as a result of that unprecedented outage number, we needed to have an unprecedented response. So we brought those crews in as soon as it was safe to bring them into Houston, and got them to work. There are more than 11,000 people working on the system today.
Gage Goulding: 11,000?
Jason Ryan: Yes.
Gage Goulding: So let’s talk about that. That was an incredible goal of a million people restored by the end of today. Are you confident? Are we going to reach that?
Jason Ryan: Yes, we’re on track to reach that. We, restored 918,000 customers as of 1:00 today. So we’re on track to hit that million customer mark. Our crews are working 16 hour days. And we’re going to work non-stop around the clock until we get all of our customers back on. But we are confident in hitting, our goal for today.
Gage Goulding: So we put an article up earlier asking our KPRC 2 Insiders to, you know, give us some questions that they want to ask you if they can be in the hot seat with you right now. One of the questions was, and we saw some crews, you know, just in a parking lot. “There’s crews down the street for me, there in a parking lot. They’re not working. What are they doing?” Is that a shift waiting to go on? You know, what are these? How does that all work?
Jason Ryan: It could be a number of things. It could be them documenting the work that they’ve done so far. It could be them getting additional directions for the work they need to do. You know, some of these crews, they get on site. Based on the assessment that they’ve done, that we’ve done, they may need additional information before they can get started working. Again. 10,000 plus of these personnel are not CenterPoint energy employees. They need to understand the standards to which we have to build our system. They need to understand how high the clearances for the lines need to be to comply with local ordinances. So they may be getting that additional information before they start their work. Or they may be, recording the work that’s been done to date so that we can get those outage numbers constantly updated. You know, so there are a number of reasons why they may be, idle for a minute. They may also be on break. We know our customers are hot. The men and women doing this work are hot. So they are taking breaks. They are rehydrating. So that may be another reason why you see, the crews not actively working, but they are out there working.
Gage Goulding: What are some of the biggest problems that you’re dealing with right now? Is it you know, what we saw during the May storm? Transmission lines down. Is it vegetation? What are some of the biggest obstacles out there?
Jason Ryan: Yeah. So unlike that storm, unlike, Harvey before it, this is not a storm that caused material problems on our transmission system. The transmission system of the big poles and wires that move power across the state. We didn’t have material damage to the transmission system. We didn’t have material damage to our substations. Our substations didn’t flood, like they did during Harvey. This is a distribution system challenge. It is the poles and the wires that go from the substations to your home or business. That’s the distribution system. And it’s largely debris on that distribution system. It could be entire trees, that have fallen over. It could be limbs that have fallen over. You know, we’ve gone through significant freezes, significant drought, significant rain, unprecedented, extreme weather conditions on our large trees here in Houston. You’ve got large canopies without mature root systems and so that’s why you see entire trees coming over onto our infrastructure. So it is a vegetation tree problem on the distribution system. Our personnel as of the end of the day yesterday had walked 4,500 miles of distribution lines to assess the problem so they can assign the right crews to do the right work. You know before we can send the right crews out, we need to know do we need to send a construction crew out a large construction crew to rebuild the poles and the wires? Do we need to send a vegetation crew out to remove trees, or do we need to send a smaller crew out, to rework smaller parts of the distribution system? Knowing which crews to send out is the reason we do that assessment work in the first 48 hours.
Gage Goulding: And we we talked about, brought it up to the ratio back in May. That put quite a strain, actually, believe it or not, June 7 is when we did that interview. Fast forward a month to the day is whenever Beryl was about to make landfall. So just very ironic. And, you know, we talked back then about how during Ike, CenterPoint had 12 days to get, you know, ready to brace for it in duration. You had no time.
Jason Ryan: 15 minutes. Yeah.
Gage Goulding: How much time did you, you know, realize that? This is going to this is going to impact us and our customers.
Jason Ryan: eah. So we started watching this storm nine days out. And as everybody knows, at that time, it wasn’t looking like it was coming to Texas. Obviously, as the days got closer to Monday, that started to change. It really started to change over the weekend. When it was more clear that it was going to hit the Houston area. So we, lined up 3,000 mutual aid resources to come into Houston before the weekend. As it became more clear that this storm was going to have a direct hit on us, that’s when we increased the number of people that we asked for. And that’s where the, greater than 10,000 crews came in to play when it was clear that the storm was going to hit right here.
Gage Goulding: And one of the things that we talked about in depth that there’s already changed from the derecho to now was the outage tracker. And I, I want to quote our interview that we had. You said,”We didn’t meet customer expectations when that wasn’t available, when they needed it most. It’s not acceptable to us or our customers.” And this is what really stuck with me, “We know that we will not have that grace from our customers and communities to miss it again.”
Jason Ryan: That’s right.
Gage Goulding: The new outage tracker. You promised a new outage tracker in maybe a little bit quicker than you would have wanted to try it out. Are you happy with the new outage tracker? And is this the solution to make sure people are informed? [16:07:42][37.4]
Jason Ryan: So the outage tracker map that we put up, last night is still a temporary fix that shows kind of in groups where you are in our restoration process. We will update that map three times a day at noon, at 4 p.m., 8 p.m. We will update it three times a day. Starting tomorrow, we will have estimated restoration times. That’s more granular than what you see there today. That is still a temporary fix.
We are starting completely from scratch with a new outage map, that we unfortunately were aiming for the end of this month in advance of the typical hurricane, peak of hurricane season, right? August. September.
But we are bringing a completely new, outage tracker map that will be able to withstand the significant traffic that we saw during the derecho. It was that significant traffic on the map that brought that site down. We knew if we put that same site back up, it would not meet customer expectations this go-around either. So that’s why we came up with the outage map that we put out yesterday. We will continue to refine the information on that map and provide estimated restoration times starting tomorrow.
Gage Goulding: Another thing we talked about back in June, and it seems like such a long time ago, but in the broader, you know, business, there really isn’t. We talked about the supplies because that’s our concern back then was how does how did that the Rachel affect hurricane season where you have all your stock built up. And I remember you telling me that, you know, you said I can’t lie to you. We’re trying to get everything put back together. Were you able to replenish your stock in time, or are you facing any supply chain issues or we need more poles and we can’t get them?
Jason Ryan: We don’t have any material challenges with our supply right now. We did replenish that over the course of the last month plus, since the derecho. So we are not having supply issues, causing delays and restoration.
Gage Goulding: If I have no power, I see my neighbors still have it. I think there’s a lot of people. The number one question I get is, you know, when is you know, 77098 coming on when it was like a zip code or something like that, right. What can you tell people? Yeah. After. And I get it, I don’t have power either at home right now. It was a very uncomfortable sleep last night.
Jason Ryan: Same.
Gage Goulding: So you don’t have power, right?
Jason Ryan: Right. That’s right.
Gage Goulding: So even even one of the top dog doesn’t have that happen. So you’re you’re with us, you know, and I’m sure you’re wondering when is that beautiful white truck going to come down and fix my stuff. What can you offer to the CenterPoint customers and people of Houston to just help us get through this? You know what we dig For any information, what would you offer?
Jason Ryan: So, we know that customers want to understand the process. So yesterday we put out a visual of the process. It’s a five step process, right? It starts with our preparation post-storm. It starts with assessment. That’s step two of the process. Many of our customers are still in step two, but a number of our customers have gone on to step three, which is restoration at the circuit level. Think of, circuits being the main highways of the distribution system that bring on entire areas of town. And so we start working on circuits first with the theory of bring on the most people the quickest and you’ll get to the one-days, two-days later. We know that’s still frustrating for those, 1 or 2 people that are out in that neighborhood, but our priority is to get the most people on the soonest. So as soon as we finish those circuit level outages, that’s where you might see certain neighborhoods on, but other neighborhoods not on. Again, we work down the priority list. So, step threeare those circuit level, outages. Step four starts getting into the neighborhood specific outage and then step five is the premise-specific outage.
During Hurricane Ike, for example, I was the last house in the neighborhood to get on because the line to my house was on the ground. Nobody else had the line on the ground. And so I was one of the last ones because that’s the process that we use.
Gage Goulding: And everybody wants to have the priority status. Even you don’t have the priority status. Is there a priority leveling? Is there certain neighborhoods get power first because it’s, you know, status or anything like that or is it based off of where the hospitals are?
Jason Ryan: We do give priority to a number of public safety-related premises. So think water treatment facilities, 911 centers. So we do prioritize getting those facilities back up while at the same time we’re working on the circuit level outages for the homes and businesses. So we do prioritize those public safety necessary premises to get back up before you get into boil water notices unnecessarily, things like that. So we don’t want the problems to get bigger just because, you might be the one-days, two-days, but you’re an incredibly important public safety premise So we do prioritize those. We are working through those priority lists as we speak.
Gage Goulding: And we only have a couple of minutes. I want to get across two more things here. The last time we talked in June, you said Ike cost about $700 million in the derecho in May was around roughly at the time about $100 million. Is there any forecast on what this has already cost or what it will cost?
Jason Ryan: Not yet. We’re still in the first 48 hours of the event, but we have brought in many more crews than we brought in, for the derecho, so this will be, you know, a multitude or, you know, twice as much, probably as the derecho event, but we’re still working on that.
Gage Goulding: And, we talked about this in depth in June, and we reported on it and I think this is a really interesting thing, the Resilience Plan, a huge monumental investment by CenterPoint to make the grid stronger. A lot of the questions people had were actually answered by that like, “Why isn’t CenterPoint investing in making the grid and everything stronger?” That’s actually in the process of happening. Can you explain how and what the Resilience Plan is and how that’s going to help? If we knock on wood and hopefully don’t get one of these again. But if it [the plan] happens, how it will help prevent having these monumental numbers?
Jason Ryan: So our Resilience Plan that we filed with the state back in March has 28 different programs associated with it. Some of them are on hard infrastructure, like distribution lines, where we’re replacing wooden poles with harder composite poles. Some of them are cybersecurity related. Some of them are physical security related. But let me stick with the pole example. And we’ve seen during the duration that we’ve seen during this storm where we’ve already started putting those composite poles up. In these severe weather events, those composite poles remain standing, and right next to them, wooden poles that we haven’t yet replaced are on the ground, snapped in half. So we know from these early tests that the Resilience Plan will yield better results once it’s fully implemented.
Gage Goulding: Well, Jason, thank you very much. I appreciate you taking the time. We appreciate all the work that CenterPoint is doing and you know, look, a lot of people still in Houston without power it’s going to take time, but 12,000 people, that’s a lot of people that are out there working right now. Anything else you want to add in there that we didn’t get to?
Jason Ryan: You know, only again recognizing that our customers are feeling the brunt of this. And understanding that in addition to the power being out, many of them have suffered significant, loss to property, right? Trees on their houses, trees on their cars. Trees on their businesses. And so our hearts go out to our customers. We thank them for their patience as we continue to do restoration. But we do know, that there’s a lot of suffering out in the community and we’re we will not stop working until the work is done.
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