Almost 1 million East Texas power customers still in dark since Beryl hit July 8

Almost 1 million electric customers remained offline in East Texas July 12, five days after Hurricane Beryl barreled into the Gulf Coast, and about 500,000 customers may remain in the dark July 15 amid a continuing National Weather Service heat advisory.

CenterPoint Energy's Houston Electric utility remains the most severely affected after 2.26 million of its 2.6 million customers were offline as Beryl exited the Houston area July 8. As of about 2:30 pm CT July 12, more than 860,000 customers lacked service, according to PowerOutage.us.

"We are encouraged by the tremendous progress we have made as we track ahead of our restoration expectations," said Lynnae Wilson, CenterPoint senior vice president for electric business on July 12. "We are not going to stop until every impacted customer is back online. "Many of the outages we have resolved have related to trees and other vegetation damaging our electrical equipment in the sustained high winds we experienced during the storm. Since Monday, crews have replaced over 2,000 poles and addressed damage from more than 6,000 trees impacting lines and other electrical equipment."

The company has said it expects to restore service to 80% of affected customers by the end of July 14, but that would still leave about 450,000 customers without service.

High temperatures, low loads

The National Weather Service has heat advisories in effect for 12 East Texas counties, including Houston's Harris County, where a forecast high of 91 degrees F on July 13 could coincide with a heat index as high as 102 F.

Electric Reliability Council of Texas load remains suppressed, compared with 2019-2023 averages for dates through July 12, but ERCOT forecast loads to exceed the previous five-year averages on July 14-15.

For the week of July 8-12, ERCOT Houston Hub real-time on-peak prices have averaged 84.5% below those daily averages 2019-2023.

Houston Ship Channel spot prices have also been week, but not by commensurate levels – an average 46.3% for July 8-12.