CenterPoint Energy is a big player in Texas, with most of its electricity customers in the Houston area. Its total load on the Texas grid is about 25%.
With hurricane season fast approaching on June 1, CenterPoint is promising that its outage tracker is ready for the worst. Last year, customers were frustrated with Centerpoint after its previous tracker proved useless during several storms, including a derecho that hit in May and Hurricane Beryl in July.
Claire Hao, who covers energy and the power grid for the Houston Chronicle, said the new tracking system rolled out last August.
“The biggest change that was made was they switched from a physical server to a cloud-based platform,” she said. “The reason for moving to the cloud is that it’s able to automatically scale its capacity in response to more people using the tracker.”
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Last spring, the tracker broke during the derecho and then remained broken all the way until August, Hao said.
“CenterPoint has given a few reasons for why it broke,” she said. “The initial reason was that too many people were on the site – so like when you’re trying to get tickets with Ticketmaster, it’s [the same thing].”
The server also used to be housed on a physical server that was damaged during the derecho.
“So that’s why now they’ve moved to an online system that’s able to scale automatically,” Hao said. “Apparently it’s able to host up to 20 million users at the same time in a given hour. So that is apparently six times the amount of traffic they saw during Hurricane Beryl.”
Some meteorologists say we’re overdue for another Hurricane Harvey-sized event, or at least another major hurricane. In the aftermath of a big storm like that, Hao said it’s key for those affected to know where in their area has power so they can find resources and supplies.
“And that’s why during the hurricane of last year, especially Houston-area residents were really upset that they couldn’t depend on the CenterPoint outage tracker,” she said. “A lot of people actually started using the Whataburger app, realizing that the app showed which restaurants were open and which were closed, and that was kind of like a pseudo way of knowing which areas in the region have power.”
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City officials were also struggling without access to a reliable power outage map.
“Houston city officials or other local officials rely on a status tracker to deploy resources,” Hao said. “CenterPoint not having that information available also slowed that response. The City of Houston actually had to make its own outage tracker.”
State officials have also responded to what happened last year with the CenterPoint outage tracker.
“The state utility regulator – that’s the Public Utility Commission of Texas; it’s a state agency – they actually implemented new rules that require that every single utility in the state have a functional outage tracker,” Hao said. “Now, if a utility outage tracker becomes nonfunctional, they have to report that to the agency; they have to give a timeline of when it’ll be back up. Or if they take that down for maintenance, you know, when it will be back up. And it’s just meant to keep these utilities accountable for actually having this tool available if we need it.”
