Keeping the power on in Texas for the long haul

Challenge

In 2023, CenterPoint Energy, the main electric utility in the greater Houston area, was contending with a challenge familiar to energy-sector players all over the country: 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—sparked 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.

Time was of the essence, as CenterPoint wanted to have a new resilience plan ready to submit to the Public Utility Commission (PUC) of Texas 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 PUC approval.

Approach

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 us with a wider remit: to fundamentally reshape the company’s resilience strategy—this time with a concrete target in mind. 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:

• Installing automation devices capable of self-healing
• Raising substations above the 500-year flood plain
• Undergrounding more than 50% of CenterPoint’s electric system
• Replacing or installing 130,000 storm-resilient poles and braces
• Modernizing 20,150 spans of underground cables to reduce the frequency and impact of outages

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 then evaluated the benefits of each measure 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