HOUSTON – Weeks after Hurricane Beryl knocked out power to more than 2 million customers in the Greater Houston area, CenterPoint Energy promises to improve itself when communicating with the public.
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Starting with releasing a new online, cloud-based outage tracker that will be released to the public by August 1. This comes after CenterPoint executives sat down with the Texas Public Utility Commission (PUC) amid a state-ordered investigation into how they responded to the millions of outages.
During the discussion, CenterPoint CEO Jason Wells issued a public apology and promised the energy giant would “get better” when it came to communicating with customers in times of crises.
“The smart meters were useful in our restoration efforts. However, they were not useful to our customers. And for that, I apologize,” he said. “That’s why we can make the commitment, sitting in front of all of you today, that we will have an outage tracker on August 1st. When we do have that outage tracker, the meters will provide benefits.”
We apologize to our customers who endured outages from Hurricane Beryl and were frustrated by our communications. We...
Posted by CenterPoint Energy on Thursday, July 25, 2024
During the frustrations caused by the power outages, CenterPoint hoped to calm things by introducing a “restoration map,” which caused even more confusion for even KPRC 2 staff to try and decode.
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As for what happened to the original outage map, a CenterPoint spokesperson told KPRC 2 in July, that their website got so overwhelmed during the Derecho in May they had to discontinue it.
“The original map; what happened is we had too many people, and there were a lot of third-party companies as well that were trying to read the map all at the same time, and it just caused issues, so we had to take it down,” Michelle Hundley said. “We are currently working on another map that’s going to be cloud-based so that we don’t have that same issue going forward that should be released, fairly soon. And then we’re going to have another map at the beginning of next year that should be better, and provide additional information to our customers.
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Wells echoed these claims to the Texas PUC saying its internal servers couldn’t handle all those users at once but is working to deliver the new and more improved tracker in a faster timeline.
“We committed to bringing, a cloud-based outage tracker online by August 1st, which has historically been the start of hurricane season. And that two-month implementation is faster than what has happened in the industry previously,” he explained. “As we were building this new outage tracker, and we used maps that were more tied to the circuit level, that created frustration at address or, meter level. And that was a reflection of this period of time between when we had to take down our own outage tracker and before we can bring our new outage tracker up.”