CenterPoint Energy Outage Map & Restoration Timeline: Latest Updates on Power, Billing Relief, and Safety Tips

CenterPoint Energy accelerates grid-hardening ahead of the 2025 hurricane season Houston’s dominant electric and natural-gas utility, CenterPoint Energy, is racing the calendar. With the official start of the Atlantic hurricane season only days away, the company says it has finished every “critical resiliency action” on its Greater Houston Resiliency Initiative (GHRI) checklist—two years earlier than projected. The utility reports that 400 miles of the region’s most outage-prone overhead distribution lines have now been relocated underground, dramatically reducing exposure to wind and flying debris. Emergency drill tests new playbook Last week CenterPoint Energy hosted a day-long emergency response exercise with Houston-area fire departments, law-enforcement agencies and critical-care hospitals. The tabletop and field drill simulated a Category 4 landfall, testing communications, mutual-aid staging and rapid-damage assessment technologies. Company officials say lessons learned in 2024’s catastrophic storm outages have been folded into an updated playbook that prioritizes feeder circuits serving medical centers, water treatment plants and evacuation corridors. Outage tracker 2.0 promises faster, clearer updates Perhaps the most visible change for customers is the relaunch of CenterPoint Energy’s outage tracker. The redesigned portal adds sub-circuit granularity, color-blind-friendly mapping and estimated restoration times that refresh every 15 minutes. CEO Jason Wells says the upgrade responds to criticism that last year’s interface “left customers in the dark in more ways than one.” The Texas Standard reports that the new system performed flawlessly during recent severe-weather tests, handling ten times the normal web traffic without a glitch. Battery storage pilot bolsters critical feeders Beyond undergrounding, CenterPoint Energy is partnering with Houston-area universities on a 24 MWh lithium-ion battery storage project designed to keep power flowing to two Level 1 trauma centers during prolonged outages. The pilot, slated to go live in August, will also provide frequency regulation services to the ERCOT grid when not in emergency mode. Company engineers say early modeling shows the batteries could shave 20 MW off peak demand during extreme heat events. Customer preparedness remains key Despite the utility’s progress, executives stress that personal preparedness still matters. They urge the 2.6 million electric customers in the Houston metro to: • Verify that mobile numbers are registered for outage text alerts. • Stock 72 hours of food, water and prescription medications. • Keep portable chargers ready for medical devices and smartphones. Looking ahead CenterPoint Energy plans to invest an additional $3 billion over the next five years in resilience, including smart switches, feeder ties and flood-resistant substations. With meteorologists predicting an “extremely active” 2025 storm season, the utility argues that front-loading investment today will save tens of millions in restoration costs tomorrow—and, more importantly, cut outage hours for Houston residents when they can least afford the dark. As hurricane season approaches, all eyes will be on whether CenterPoint Energy’s fortified network and tech upgrades can deliver the reliability promise Texans have been waiting for.