Helping the Energy Ecosystem Bat Better Against Various Environmental Risks

CenterPoint Energy has officially launched a new suite of actions, actions that arrive on the scene to facilitate the next phase of its Greater Houston Resiliency Initiative (GHRI). This includes strengthening the energy system and operations over the next eight months and before the start of the 2025 hurricane season. According to certain reports, these near-term actions will build on the work CenterPoint completed in the first phase of the GHRI, continue to strengthen resiliency, improve communications, develop stronger partnerships, and help the company reinforce its electric system.

More on the same would reveal how the actions in GHRI Phase Two will help enable a self-healing grid, reduce the length and frequency of outages, and lead to more than 125 million fewer outage minutes annually for customers in the Greater Houston area.

Set to be completed ahead of the 2025 hurricane season, or June 1, 2025, the whole effort is likely to include the installation or replacement of new 25,000 poles that meet extreme wind standards. Next up, it will trim down, or even completely remove, higher-risk vegetation across 4,000 miles of power lines.

Alongside that, the stated initiative will also install 4,500 automation devices, known as trip savers, and 350 Intelligent Grid Switching Devices as part of CenterPoint’s effort to build a self-healing grid which utilizes automation to respond to outages faster.

“We are proud of the immediate resiliency improvements we delivered during Phase One of the Greater Houston Resiliency Initiative and these actions were only the beginning. We have set ambitious goals to achieve even further enhancements to our resiliency before the 2025 hurricane season. We are committed to developing the self-healing grid of the future that our customers expect and deserve,” said Jason Wells, President and CEO of CenterPoint.

Moving on, the project will further oversee undergrounding of more than 400 miles of power lines. This it will ensure, while simultaneously launching a year-round public emergency preparedness and safety communications campaign. Finally, the last highlight stems from a bid to strengthen CenterPoint’s local partnerships with agencies and partners critical for its emergency response efforts.

The development in question delivers a rather interesting follow-up to CenterPoint’s recent announcement where it confirmed having completed a series of core resiliency actions during what was the first phase of its GHRI. In this initial phase, more than 2,500 employees and contractors trimmed or removed higher-risk vegetation from more than 2,000 power line miles, installed more than 1,100 stronger, more storm-resilient poles, and roped in more than 300 automated devices known as trip savers.

Apart from that, CenterPoint also launched its new outage tracker, as well as completed 40 of its original 42 commitments, including all of those with a deadline on or before September 30.

Looking past the near-term actions of GHRI Phase Two, CenterPoint will refile its long-term resiliency plan with the PUCT on or before January 31, 2025. The overarching goal here would be to mitigate a broad spectrum of risks that threaten its system by hardening key aspects of the infrastructure, enhancing the security of the grid, and building a smarter grid which can combat extreme weather, major storms, and hurricanes.

Not just that, it will also propose investing at least $5 billion from 2026 to 2028, which is the largest investment for Greater Houston infrastructure in the company’s nearly 160-year history. Markedly enough, this $5 billion is a part of CenterPoint’s new capital investment plan that includes more than $21 billion worth of total capital investment in its Texas electric and gas systems from 2025 through 2030.

“We know how important reliable and resilient energy is to our 2.8 million customers and that the Greater Houston region is the economic engine for the State of Texas and the energy capital of the world. That is why we are so focused on modernizing our infrastructure as we work toward our goal of building the most resilient coastal grid in the country that will serve the energy needs of Houstonians for years to come,” said Wells.

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