CenterPoint Energy restores power to 49,000 customers this Christmas

The extra holiday crews that CenterPoint Energy assembled in preparation for severe weather on Christmas Eve were able to restore power to 49,000 customers.

From 14 Wednesday, CenterPoint Energy said it restored power to “almost all” of the remaining 1,800 electric customers who were still without power Wednesday morning.

“Thanks to our customers for their patience and thanks to our crews for their dedication as they worked safely and quickly overnight and throughout Christmas morning to get the lights back on,” the company said.

CenterPoint said the Christmas Eve storms, which primarily affected service areas in Cypress, Brazoria and Greenspoint, “caused little damage.”

The utility’s system “remained robust and operated well, with 99.9% of customers never losing power,” the company said.

CenterPoint Energy was the target of a Public Utility Commission audit that concluded in late November and widespread outrage from Houstonians over the utility’s handling of Hurricane Beryl and the May Derecho. The company’s outage tracker stopped working during the outage and remained down through Beryl, prompting Houstonians to use the Whataburger app as an outage tracker instead.

In September, the company pledged to improve its preparedness ahead of Hurricane Francine.

As of late Wednesday morning, approximately 1,800 customers remain without power, according to CenterPoint. The utility increased its holiday staffing levels to prepare for the combination of a cold front, hail and damaging winds that hit the Houston region. Officials said 150 workers restored power overnight Tuesday and Wednesday morning.

“We know how important it is to have power every day, but especially during the holidays, and with more than 49,000 customers restored in the last 24 hours, we will continue to work until everyone’s lights are back on,” said the company on the social media platform X.

The company has encouraged customers to use CenterPoint’s updated outage tracker, which was updated in August after customers shared concerns about inaccurate and misleading information about the original tracker. The new outage tracker is updated with improved reliability, estimated restoration times and weather information.