Between 100,000 and 200,000 CenterPoint Energy customers are expected to lose power during the winter storm, representatives for the utility company said.
CenterPoint said it expects to be able to restore power within 12 hours to any customers who experience an outage, and the company has stationed 3,300 workers across the Houston area for restoration work, Senior Vice President Keith Stevens said at a news conference Saturday evening.
“We’re ready, we’re prepared and we’re going to be responding to this event,” said Natan Brownell, CenterPoint's vice president of resilience and capital delivery.
About 1,700 CenterPoint customers had lost power in the Houston area as of 6 p.m., according to the utility’s outage tracker. CenterPoint serves about 2.9 million customers in the Houston area.
CenterPoint meteorologist Lena Dziechowski said that if temperatures in Houston drop lower than expected, the precipitation would include more sleet than freezing rain, which can coat tree limbs and cause them to fall onto equipment.
“(Sleet) is those ice pellets that ping off of windshields, so it doesn’t stick to power lines, it doesn’t stick to tree limbs,” Dziechowski said. “It’s the freezing rain that would be the highest threat potential for power outages.”
For most of the Houston area, freezing rain is not forecast to cause ice accumulation thicker than two-tenths or one-quarter of an inch, the threshold at which power lines are more likely to be damaged, Dziechowski said. However, “isolated spots” north and west of the city could see heavier coatings of ice, she said. Wind gusts of up to 30 mph are expected across the region, but they are not likely to down power lines, she said.
Current Texas outages
About 47,000 customers were without power across the state as of 6 p.m. Saturday, particularly in northeast counties along the Louisiana border, according to outage tracker site PowerOutage.com. Those included more than 14,000 customers of Oncor, which delivers power to parts of central Texas, Dallas-Fort Worth and west Texas.
Oncor spokesperson Andrew Clark told the Houston Chronicle that he could not estimate when power would be restored because of uncertainty around a second wave of precipitation expected in Oncor’s service area. He said that the utility has made “extensive preparations all week for an all-hands-on-deck, company-wide response.
Winter weather arrived in the Panhandle early Friday, and by Saturday evening, temperatures dipped into the single-digits and teens in North Texas as the freeze line marched south. Icy roads were reported across most of the state and as far south as Austin by 6 p.m., according to the Texas Department of Transportation’s live road conditions tracker.
Though localized power outages are expected, officials and experts have said this weekend’s winter storm is unlikely to cause the state’s power grid to fail as it did during the 2021 freeze. During that storm, multiple power plants failed in the frigid temperatures, and state regulators ordered widespread outages to prevent catastrophic grid collapse.
This weekend’s freeze is not expected to last long enough to cause plant failures. Sub-freezing temperatures are forecast to last 24 to 36 hours for most Houstonians starting Sunday evening, significantly shorter than the week-long freeze some residents experienced five years ago.
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