CenterPoint Energy said Wednesday the electricity network could not tell residents when their electricity might be turned off or restored, but warned customers to prepare until the weekend without reliable power.
The Greater Houston Electricity Provider said it would continue its strategy, announced Tuesday, of long-term outages to give customers who were in the dark a chance to heat their homes, defrost pipes and charge appliances. However, CenterPoint cannot give customers a warning about when the power shifts may occur, said Jason Ryan, senior vice president for regulatory affairs.
“Everyone has a lot to take away from this event, and we’re always looking for ways to improve,” Ryan said. “But the reality remains the same, that is, in this unprecedented event with so many generations down, you use blunt instruments, not exactly.”
With the freezing point for a fourth consecutive night, more than 1.1 million CenterPoint customers were without power Wednesday at 5 p.m. – nearly half of the total outages in Texas.
CenterPoint’s distribution system is ready to restore power, but the power stations in Texas simply do not produce enough electricity to meet demand, Ryan said. The state network operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, has been instructing distributors since the end of Sunday to reduce freight by shutting down customers.
ERCOT said on Wednesday it could not estimate when the power outages would end.
CenterPoint announced Wednesday night that ERCOT had reported “additional power generation capacity” and said its staff was preparing to “revive parts of the power system that were without power.” Officials asked customers with electricity and natural gas services to save both resources until midnight to help more neighbors get back on the network.
Ryan said the network operator was opaque about its mandates for CenterPoint, which thwarted the utility’s plans to bring more customers online. The executive said the power supply is still too low for CenterPoint to safely implement short, rotating eclipses of 15 minutes to an hour to ensure no group of customers suffers the most damage.
The improvised plan to distribute distributions has had only limited success, as some customers who lost power early Monday have not yet restored the service. Others complained that they eventually gained more than 24 hours of power, only to lose it again an hour or two later.
Juan Sorto, a civilian leader in northeast Houston, said he and many of his neighbors lost power around 2 a.m. Monday and have not regained it Wednesday night.
That the working-class area centered around Mesa in Tidwell, left for days without heat or an open grocery store in the area, which harvested rainwater to flush toilets, felt just like the latest felt, he said.
Many residents in the area did not recover from the devastating floods from nearby Halls Bayou during Hurricane Harvey, and the blue sails on many neighbors’ roofs were there even before the 2017 storm.
Sorto and his extended family, who have their roots in El Salvador, wondered out loud if they were really doing better in America.
“We expect this from our governments at home. “We just can not believe that this is happening here,” he said. ‘With the pandemic and everything, I mean, if I’m going to live under this kind of system, I might as well go back to El Salvador, where the weather is 70 degrees and I can go to the beach. Anything is better than this shit. ”
CenterPoint’s system has 1,800 circuits, each with between 1,000 and 8,000 customers.
The utility has cut customers’ power by shutting down some individual circuits at its discretion, said Jason Hulbert, the manager of high-voltage planning. All circuits are eligible for shutdown, except those circuits that provide power to public infrastructure, such as hospitals and police stations.
The circuits include residential and commercial customers, which explains why a homeowner without power can be frustrated when a school is lit up overnight.
“We do not organize them by community, neighborhood or street,” Hulbert said. “It’s a geographically dispersed method.”
The utility has grouped the circuits into three blocks, according to ERCOT rules, which can reduce 25 percent emergency charge if necessary.
Unlike utilities in California, which plan in advance to divide power outages by customers into sectors, CenterPoint does not have such a plan. Ryan said the company can have no way of notifying customers if it is going to be possible with an eclipse that in turn helps get other power back.
According to him, the exclusion of entire circuits is by no means the best way to manage blackouts.
“Our system is not built for this scenario, in terms of low-generation outages online,” Ryan said. “This is therefore not an ideal operational scenario.”
Keith Stapleton, spokesman for Sam Houston Electric Cooperative, which supplies electricity to ten counties northeast of Houston, including parts of Montgomery, Liberty and San Jacinto, said all electrical delivery agencies’ goal is to turn whatever is needed, process is not necessary. likes a switch; it may take a few hours to get a circuit online again.
“We have line stations up and down the circuit, and if they are powerful, they will start erecting the fuses again so that the whole circuit is not turned on at the same time,” Stapleton said. This ensures that “it does not go straight again.”
Unsafe roads have prevented more SHEC staff from accessing the necessary infrastructure, he said to prevent the cooperative from effectively reversing the disruptions early in the storm. Another obstacle was that many homes in the rural provider’s network were not physically connected to every power station serving the system.
“You can not deliver power if you do not have the road to get it there,” Stapleton said.
SHEC sent 28,000 customers off the network, but by Tuesday night had only 1,700 customers without power and by Wednesday night only a few hundred, some due to damaged lines.
Lorena Durrant, a resident of Southeast Harris County, said she thinks CenterPoint can improve communication with customers. Without Monday, she was relied on without power to rely on Twitter’s ghost butt and speculations about when the service will be restored.
“It will help me if I know ahead of time if we are back five hours with the power, and everyone can take a nice hot shower,” Durrant said. “It will help if they reach out somehow.”
Sandra Sota has lined up with dozens of other End End buyers outside La Michoacana Meat Market, while the fierce downtown may have had power while her home in Eastwood did not.
She leaves to find the necessities: meat and tortillas. Water was also at the top of her list because her house was also without it.
“This is Texas. It’s a big city, ‘she said. “It’s amazing.”
Back in northeast Houston, Sorto was worried that the disruptions would fall evenly on all of the city’s residents, but that the recovery would be the most difficult for his neighbors, just as with Harvey.
“Most people here can not afford $ 2,000 to replace a roof,” he said. ‘Do you think once the pipes go out and they burst, they will be able to replace them too? If you live in a community like this, where the majority are African American, Hispanic, Latino, immigrants, this is our reality. ‘
Nicole Hensley reported.