Half a million Houston-area customers of CenterPoint Energy will have to wait until early next week before electricity is restored after Hurricane Beryl’s assault on the Texas coast.
Day and night could be brutally hot for people without a place to stay cool. Temperatures in areas without power are expected to remain above 90 degrees this weekend.
The utility’s restoration of local poles and lines that hurricane winds damaged this week is returning power to the Texas metropolis. But regulators and elected officials, including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, face a question that’s haunted the state for years: Can Texas defend its power grid against extreme temperatures, storms and floods that scientists say will only get worse?
During the first open meeting since Beryl, members of the Public Utility Commission of Texas on Thursday largely avoided discussion of how future outages can be prevented or how to speed up plans for hardening local grid infrastructure.