CenterPoint Energy said on Wednesday that the utility is unable to tell residents when electricity can be turned off or restored, but has warned customers to prepare to live without reliable power by the weekend.
The electricity supplier for greater Houston said it would continue its strategy, announced Tuesday, of alternating long-term outages to give customers in the dark a chance to heat their homes, defrost pipes and charge devices. CenterPoint, however, will not be able to give customers any notice as to when these energy changes may occur, said Senior Vice President of Regulatory Affairs Jason Ryan.
“Everyone has a lot to take from this event and we are always looking for ways to continually improve,” said Ryan. “But the reality remains the same, that is, in this unprecedented event, with so many generations out, you are using blunt, not precise instruments.”
With freezing temperatures expected for the fourth consecutive night, more than 1.1 million CenterPoint customers went out of power at 5 pm on Wednesday – almost half of the total outages in Texas.
CenterPoint’s distribution system is set to restore power, but Texas plants are simply not producing enough electricity to meet demand, said Ryan. The state grid operator, the Texas Electric Reliability Council, has since the end of Sunday instructed distributors to reduce loads by closing customers.
ERCOT said on Wednesday that it cannot estimate when the blackouts will end.
On Wednesday night, CenterPoint announced that ERCOT was reporting “additional power generation capacity” and said its team was preparing to “re-energize parts of the electrical system that have run out of power”. The concessionaire’s employees asked customers with electricity and natural gas services to conserve both resources until midnight to help more neighbors get back on the grid.
Ryan said the network operator has been opaque about its policies for CenterPoint, which has thwarted the dealer’s plans to bring more customers online. The executive said the power supply is still too low for CenterPoint to safely implement short, rotating blackouts from 15 minutes to an hour to ensure that no group of customers can withstand the impact of interruptions.
His improvised plan to spread the outages was only of limited success, as some customers who lost power on Monday have not yet had their service restored. Others complained about finally getting energy after more than 24 hours, to lose it again an hour or two later.
Juan Sorto, a civic leader in northeastern Houston, said he and many of his neighbors lost power around 2 am on Monday and had not yet recovered it on Wednesday night.
The fact that the working-class area practically centered around Mesa in Tidwell had gone unheated or without a grocery store open anywhere nearby, collecting rainwater to flush, seemed just the last oversight, he said.
Several residents in the area have not recovered from the devastating floods that occurred near Halls Bayou during Hurricane Harvey, and the blue tarps on the roofs of many neighbors already existed before the 2017 storm.
Sorto and his relatives, who have roots in El Salvador, wonder aloud if they are really better off in America.
“We expect this from our governments at home. We just can’t believe what is happening here, ”he said. “With the pandemic and everything, that is, if I am going to live in this type of system, it is better to go back to El Salvador, where the weather is 70 degrees and I can go to the beach. Anything is better than that crap. “
The CenterPoint system has 1,800 circuits, each with between 1,000 and 8,000 customers.
The dealership cut power to customers by shutting down some of the individual circuits at its discretion, said Jason Hulbert, the dealership’s high voltage planning manager. All circuits can be disconnected, except those that supply public security infrastructure, such as hospitals and police stations.
The circuits include residential and commercial customers, which explains why an owner without power can be frustrated to see a school lit up at night.
“We don’t organize them by community, neighborhood or street,” said Hulbert. “It is a geographically dispersed methodology.”
The concessionaire grouped the circuits in three blocks, according to the ERCOT rules, which can provide an emergency load reduction of 25%, if necessary.
Unlike California utility companies, which plan blackouts in advance by dividing customers into sectors, CenterPoint does not have such a plan. Ryan said the company has no way of notifying customers when they might experience a blackout, which in turn helps others get power back.
Closing entire circuits, he said, is far from an ideal way to manage blackouts.
“Our system was not built for this scenario, in terms of downtime with very little online generation,” said Ryan. “So it is not an ideal operating scenario.”
Keith Stapleton, a spokesman for Sam Houston Electric Cooperative, which supplies electricity to 10 counties northeast of Houston, including parts of Montgomery, Liberty and San Jacinto, said the goal of all electricity distribution entities is to rotate electricity. all the necessary blackouts, but the process is not like pushing a button; it may take a few hours to bring a circuit back online.
“We put the line people up and down this circuit and, as it is energized, they will start putting the fuses back up, so that the entire circuit is not turned on at once,” said Stapleton. This ensures that “do not go out again”.
Unsafe roads prevented more SHEC employees from reaching the necessary infrastructure, he said, preventing the cooperative from effectively switching interruptions early in the storm. Another obstacle was that many households in the rural provider’s network are not physically connected to each plant serving the system.
“You cannot supply energy unless you have a way to get there,” said Stapleton.
SHEC eliminated 28,000 customers from the network, but on Tuesday night it had only about 1,700 customers without power and on Wednesday night only a few hundred, some due to damaged lines.
Lorena Durrant, a resident of southeast Harris County, said CenterPoint could improve its communication with customers. With no power since Monday, she was left to rely on neighborhood rumors and speculation on Twitter about when the service will be restored.
“It would help me if I knew in advance if we would have five hours with the power back on and everyone could take a nice hot shower,” said Durrant. “It would help if they reached out in some way.”
Sandra Sota stood in line with dozens of other End End buyers outside the La Michoacana Meat Market, as the furious city center had power, while her Eastwood home did not.
She went out to find the essentials: meat and tortillas. Water was also at the top of his list because his house didn’t have it either.
“This is Texas. This is a big city, ”she said. “It’s unbelievable.”
Back in northeast Houston, Sorto feared that interruptions would fall evenly for all residents of the city, but that recovery would be more difficult for his neighbors, as well as with Harvey.
“Most people here cannot afford $ 2,000 to replace a roof,” he said. “Do you think that once the pipes thaw and burst, they will also be able to replace them? If you live in a community like this, where the majority are African-Americans, Hispanics, Latinos, immigrants – this is our reality. “
Nicole Hensley contributed reporting.