Courtesy of Whisker Labs
Meanwhile, the system that once fed CenterPoint’s map – which has quietly continued to report data under the hood of the utility’s website – became overwhelmed almost immediately after Beryl reached the greater Houston area.
It glitched for hours through Monday afternoon. The utility waited an additional 24 hours before posting a new outage-tracking map online. And that map came with a disclaimer warning about potential inaccuracies and lags.
“With the tool not functioning as it should, we worked to provide a short-term solution during the multi-day event,” said Logan Anderson, a CenterPoint spokesperson, in an email. “We recognize the inconvenience to our customers.”
New data made available by a Maryland-based technology company shows what the CenterPoint system should have been reporting all along. A wave of blackouts kept more than 60% of Harris County’s CenterPoint customers in the dark for over 24 hours. Restoration efforts progressed slowly, leaving over 865,000 customers still without power at 5 p.m. Thursday.
The company, Whisker Labs, is not a utility. It develops fire-prevention sensors. Yet, Whisker Labs’ technology proved more reliable in measuring power loss than CenterPoint’s specialized outage tracking systems.
“It’s shockingly bad how much the utilities actually know about their grid,” said Bob Marshall, the CEO and a co-founder of Whisker Labs. “They don’t have the technology, the sensors and the capability to understand what’s going on in real time, and to do it in a reliable way.”
[…]
CenterPoint’s internal system recorded a surge of outages in Harris County early Monday morning, as the deadly storm barreled from the coastal town of Matagorda north toward Sugar Land.
But when Beryl reached Interstate 10, the system suddenly malfunctioned, recording a dramatic – and erroneous – drop in Harris County’s outages.
The drop was compensated by an equally abrupt spike in outage reports with no location data.
“At the peak of the outages, somewhere around 2.2 to 2.3 million (CenterPoint) meters were out,” said Matt Hope, the co-founder of FindEnergy, a website that aggregates energy and solar data nationwide. “Over a million of those were falling into this unknown category.”
FindEnergy collected data from CenterPoint’s internal system in real time during the storm and shared it with the Chronicle.
The system’s technical glitches persisted throughout the day Monday. Nearly 600,000 reported outages were still missing location information at 9 p.m. that day.
As customers grew frustrated with CenterPoint’s communication lags and slow restoration times, Whisker Labs sensors funneled millions of data points into the company’s servers.
The sensors are everywhere in Harris County, said co-founder Marshall. That’s partly because the company partners with insurance companies to offer the small plug-in devices free of charge to homeowners.
In Harris County, Marshall estimated there are about 7,200 devices. Each device collects about 30 million electric signals every second, immediately alerting homeowners of impending electrical hazards and – most notably, this week – power outages.
The company’s sensor data was strikingly consistent with CenterPoint’s outage reports Monday morning. And, as the utility’s system malfunctioned, Whisker Labs sensors continued to record outages uninterrupted. The sensors also picked up on outages up to an hour faster than CenterPoint at the peak of the power loss.
There’s more, so read the rest. If we want CenterPoint to do a better job, this is a clear opportunity for improvement. It’s also exactly the sort of thing that could be mandated and assisted legislatively, at either the state or federal level.
Meanwhile, in other things that need to be fixed.
CenterPoint was still fixing damage caused by the May wind storm known as a “derecho” and by another damaging storm on May 28 when Beryl hit, Jason Ryan, CenterPoint’s executive vice president of regulatory services and government affairs, said in a July 1 interview. He estimated that CenterPoint would pay between $425 million and $475 million to repair poles, wires and transmission lines damaged during the two May storms.
Insurance does not cover damage to electrical poles, wires and transmission lines, and the cost for repairing damage from extraordinary events such as derechos and hurricanes is funded by bond offerings that are approved by the PUC and repaid through added charges on consumer bills.
“You’re looking at significantly less than $1 a month impact on customer bills, even though the number sounds very large,” Ryan said of the estimate. “Obviously, we won’t know until we get the final number, go through the process at the (Public Utility Commission) for them to review those costs and then approve or not the securitization.”
CenterPoint’s costs associated with the recovery from Hurricane Ike was $663 million, which added a $1.83 charge to customers’ bills between 2009 and 2022.
And this is an opportunity to talk about what sort of thing we should be doing to ensure that the new equipment is more resilient than the broken equipment. We already learned some things after Hurricane Ike, and the state of Florida has figured a lot of this out, too. How are we doing on that score? What could we be doing more of? What should we stop doing? If we’re not acting on this now, we’ll be facing the same questions when the next big storm comes through.
“Just bury the power lines!” I hear you cry. Sure, we can do that. There’s an obvious downside to that, which is that it’s way more expensive.
Burying distribution power lines en masse would cost three to five times more than putting lines overhead, Race said. That cost, he added, ultimately would fall to electricity customers.
Of the eight proposed grid-strengthening measures CenterPoint presents in its resiliency plan, undergrounding was considered as an alternative for three of them. Each of those three times, however, it was dismissed as cost prohibitive.
Additionally, Cohan said, underground line repairs often are more expensive and time consuming than overhead line fixes.
He also cautioned that the large-scale burial of power lines is unlikely to prevent widespread outages.
Burying power lines in every Houston neighborhood, Hundley’s email said, may not be possible.
“Because many neighborhoods in Houston are over 100 years old, the streets and yards are not designed to support underground distribution lines,” she wrote.
While burying power lines across the board may not be feasible, experts say it could be part of a larger grid-strengthening solution.
Grid resilience, Race said, must be discussed in a holistic way.
He suggested that burying lines in strategically identified areas could work in tandem with other steps toward increasing resiliency.
Cohan agreed.
“There may be specific instances where it makes sense to bury a power line,” Cohan said. “But with tens of thousands of miles of distribution lines criss-crossing our region, it’s not likely that we’re going to have a full-scale burying of power lines that’s going to be anywhere near as cost effective as other steps that might be taken.”
Other steps toward increasing grid resiliency, Race said, could include incorporating more backup power sources and better communication systems when preparing for major weather events. Trimming and better maintaining trees and greenery near power lines also could help.
Have I mentioned that this is the sort of thing that can be legislatively mandated, and also funded? We’re spending billions of taxpayer dollars to fund the construction of more natural gas power plants. We could spend a few bucks helping strengthen the distribution part of the grid as well.
You may be thinking “screw this, I’m just gonna get an generator for the next time”. Well, just use it carefully if you do.
An abnormally high number of patients have sought care for carbon monoxide poisoning this week in the Houston area, health officials and doctors said Thursday, as Hurricane Beryl knocked out power for millions and left many relying on portable generators.
“I think we’re on record pace here unfortunately,” said Dr. Joseph Nevarez, a UTHealth Houston professor and director of hyperbaric medicine and wound care at Memorial Hermann — Texas Medical Center.
Hurricane Beryl on Monday knocked out power for more than 2 million households, 1 million of whom still do not have power as of Thursday. Since the storm swept through Houston, four to eight patients per day have needed to use Memorial Hermann’s hyperbaric chamber, which delivers pure, pressurized oxygen and is usually reserved for the most severe cases of carbon monoxide poisoning, Nevarez said. Other patients have needed lower levels of care in the hospital’s emergency room.
The problem has further strained busy Houston emergency rooms and illustrated what health professionals say is a lack of education about an increasingly popular piece of machinery in the storm-stricken region.
While the number of carbon monoxide poisoning complaints usually increase with power outages, the Houston Health Department said the current volume stands out. Surveillance from medical facilities in Harris, Montgomery and Fort Bend counties found 116 carbon monoxide-related visits from midnight Monday to 10:45 a.m. Thursday, according to data provided by the health department.
“The Houston Health Department has not seen it spike so high as it did the past couple of days,” including the during the May derecho and Winter Storm Uri in 2021, said health department spokesman Porfirio Villarreal.
[…]
A common mistake, [Dr. David Persse, Houston’s chief medical officer] said, is placing the generator in the garage and cracking the garage door. That doesn’t provide enough ventilation, he said. People may also place the generator near an air vent, providing another way for the gas to make its way inside the home.
Nevarez noted that carbon monoxide sensors are relatively inexpensive and could help save lives.
“For many of our patients, it’s only by luck that they feel ill in the middle of the night and stagger or fall down and call for help, or it’s the baby crying that wakes them,” he said.
Read the manual and follow all the safety recommendations. Carbon monoxide is no joke.
Finally, HISD sustained a lot of damage on its campuses, though other area school districts and universities were a lot luckier. Meanwhile, many restaurants are hurting, from spoiled inventories to missing customers. Now is a great time to eat at your favorite places, they could use the help.
“If we want CenterPoint to do a better job, this is a clear opportunity for improvement. It’s also exactly the sort of thing that could be mandated and assisted legislatively, at either the state or federal level.”
But I thought Texans didn’t want their grid to be subject to federal regulation, or really any regulation at all. Right? That’s what Greg Abbott told us after that big February storm that knocked out power in Houston for several days. This is just us going it alone, in our Texany way. Heck, we don’t even need to have the governor in the country when a hurricane is bearing down on the state—self-reliance is the key, don’t you know!
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