In 2023, CenterPoint Energy, the main electric utility in the greater Houston area, was contending with a challenge familiar to energy providers nationwide: how to strengthen infrastructure against extreme weather. In 2024, just after an initial resilience plan was filed to address that challenge, a series of extreme weather events—including a highly destructive derecho windstorm in May and Hurricane Beryl just a few weeks later—prompted a reassessment.
Leaders at the company determined that a new, more comprehensive plan was urgently needed, one that included asset-level assessments and encompassed a broader range of long-term threats—including hurricanes, flooding, extreme temperatures, wildfires, and cyber vulnerabilities—as well as regulatory and compliance obligations.
The timeline was tight, as CenterPoint aimed to submit a new resilience plan to the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) by January 31, 2025—in keeping with HB2555, a recent piece of state legislation allowing utilities to recover costs of resiliency investments if they receive PUCT approval.
For the initial collaboration, begun in 2023, Guidehouse experts conducted a thorough assessment of CenterPoint Energy’s existing systems and identified key areas that required immediate attention to mitigate the impact of future weather-related disruptions.
Then, in the wake of the derecho and Hurricane Beryl, CenterPoint re-engaged Guidehousewith an expanded scope: to fundamentally reshape the company’s resilience strategy—this time with a clearly defined target. By 2029, the company wanted to reduce the impact of storm-related outages for its 2.8 million Houston-area customers by more than 1.3 billion minutes.
To help CenterPoint reach that goal, we employed a proprietary analytics platform called CHARM (Climate Hazard and Asset Resiliency Model), which provided critical insights to help the client better manage the complex process of prioritizing investments and selecting optimal locations for assets, thereby maximizing the benefits of the new resilience plan.
At the same time, we helped CenterPoint in the early-stage implementation of AI-enabled technologies, such as Neara, for better storm detection. The overall approach yielded multiple critical infrastructure improvements and preparedness measures, including:
Guidehouse also conducted a cybersecurity assessment that independently analyzed the tech- and cyber-related measures outlined in the Texas Utility System Resiliency Plan—from data center modernization to cloud security—and evaluated each measure's benefits through the lens of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Cybersecurity Framework (NIST CSF).
In addition to making recommendations based on those technical analyses, we supported the development of a regulatory strategy and stakeholder engagement plan that establishes performance metrics to measure the effectiveness of each resiliency measure.
The plan will be critical for ensuring the on-time completion of projects, the monitoring of actual benefits yielded by the utility’s investments, and the effective communication of the results to CenterPoint’s stakeholders.
Impact
In August 2025, the Public Utilities Commission of Texas approved the $2.7 billion system-wide plan that we helped develop. Backed by robust data and performance metrics, it represents the largest single resilience investment in CenterPoint’s history. It deploys automated self-healing technology across its network, improves vegetation management, hardens physical assets against a wider range of weather threats, and expands on state-of-the-art infrastructure modernizations.
CenterPoint projects that, collectively, the measures will reduce power interruptions by nearly a billion customer minutes over the next three years, and will return around $6.50 in benefits for every dollar spent.
The best practices and quantitative intelligence the plan is built on helped speed approval with the Texas PUC, positioning the utility to proactively address extreme weather and other threats for years to come—and securing the energy future for nearly 3 million Texans.
Guidehouse is a global AI-led professional services firm delivering advisory, technology, and managed services to the commercial and government sectors. With an integrated business technology approach, Guidehouse drives efficiency and resilience in the healthcare, financial services, energy, infrastructure, and national security markets.