The lessons Houston didn’t learn from Hurricane Harvey

Beryl, the first major hurricane of the year, has finally dissipated, but it’s still casting a long shadow in Texas. As of Tuesday afternoon, more than a week after the storm made landfall in the state, more than 100,000 electricity customers still didn’t have power — the vast majority of them in the Houston metropolitan area. Now intense heat and humidity have blanketed the region, leaving many vulnerable residents without the cooling they need to endure the hot, muggy weather with the heat index topping 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

While Beryl reached Category 5 strength earlier in the year than any hurricane on record, it landed in Texas as a much weaker Category 1 storm. It also hit a region that’s not just familiar with hurricanes — the catastrophic Hurricane Harvey was only seven years ago — but all sorts of extreme weather, including torrential downpours, thunderstorms, tornadoes, and merciless heat that have all hit the state this year.

That raises an unavoidable question: Why wasn’t the local energy infrastructure better able to withstand the storm?

At the height of Beryl’s impact, almost 3 million customers had lost power. The Public Utility Commission of Texas, the state’s main energy regulator, announced on Monday it was opening an investigation into CenterPoint Energy, the main power utility in Houston. The inquiry will look into the utility’s preparation ahead of the storm and its response in the aftermath — both of which seem to have been lacking.

“What CenterPoint is showing us by its repeated failure to provide power, is they seem to be just incapable of doing their job,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told the Associated Press. “This isn’t a failure of the entire system … This is an indictment of one company that’s failed to do its job.”

But the problems with Houston’s energy system didn’t start with Hurricane Beryl, although the tempest exposed its faults. As the Atlantic Ocean braces for an active hurricane season, the Texas coast may soon be tested again. And with global average temperatures increasing as humans change the climate, storm surges are rising and rainstorms are dishing out more water, compounding severe weather’s destructive potential.

For some Houstonians, Beryl brought back memories of Hurricane Harvey. “This one gives us PTSD, I have to tell you,” said Pablo Pinto, a professor of public policy at the University of Houston whose home was damaged during Harvey.

Harvey landed in Texas at Category 4 strength. Though it weakened to a tropical storm as it approached Houston, it dumped an astounding 4.5 feet of rain in four days, and left behind $125 billion in damages, making Harvey the second-most expensive storm to make landfall in the continental US.

Pinto co-authored a 2022 report looking back at Harvey and its lasting impacts on Houston. It found that almost one in five residents surveyed said they still hadn’t fully recovered from the storm. The storm also changed people’s attitudes toward building regulations in a city famous for not having zoning laws. More than 90 percent of respondents said they were in favor of policies like restricting construction in flood plains, blocking development in wetlands, and building codes requiring flood-prone homes to be elevated.

However, many of these measures target the losses specific to Harvey, which were mainly caused by extreme flooding rather than the high winds that might wreak havoc in a stronger storm. “We tend to prepare for the last war. That’s how we allocate resources,” Pinto said.

And many of the post-Harvey proposals have been ignored.

Houston’s city council did approve some new regulations to address flooding risk, but people are still building homes in floodplains and paving over wetlands that buffer flooding, in an effort to accommodate the city’s booming population.

Beryl, on the other hand, moved faster through Houston and inflicted most of its damage from the strong winds and the tornadoes it spawned. Those 80 mph gusts knocked over utility poles and dropped trees onto power lines, which led to the widespread electricity outages. In addition to cutting off air conditioning during a heat wave, the blackouts interrupted power to fuel pumps, forcing residents to wait hours for gasoline and diesel from the remaining operational stations. That’s a major blow in a notoriously sprawling, car-dependent city.

In this regard, Beryl was more like Hurricane Ike when it charged into Houston in 2008 as a Category 2 storm. That storm also knocked out power to millions of people, an early warning that the region’s energy infrastructure was highly vulnerable to extreme weather.

Together, these hurricanes illustrate that the intensity of the storm is only one factor in its destructive potential; the severity and the extent of the disaster also hinge on how many people are in harm’s way and what they do, or fail to do, to prepare. It’s what’s known as the expanding bullseye effect — as more people and development are put in the path of natural disasters, the damage of even weaker events can grow.

Texas’s famous independent streak extends to how it produces electricity. Unusually in the US, the Texas power grid is largely isolated from neighboring states.

That helps Texas avoid scrutiny from federal regulators and run its own freewheeling electricity markets that prioritize low prices. But this system leaves its citizens vulnerable to power disruption. Its current energy grid creates little incentive for power companies to invest in backup power or costly infrastructure upgrades. So when temperatures drop sharply or when they spike, causing surges in energy demand when generation capacity is strained, grid operators lean on customers to turn down their power use rather than import power from outside the state — or else the grid goes dark. Texas regulators are starting to change the rules to encourage companies to invest more in grid resilience and are considering building more transmission lines with other states.

Houston’s energy system has had its own unique issues within this milieu. “​​Texas in general — and CenterPoint in particular — had problems with reliability, even not during storms,” said Doug Lewin, an energy analyst who writes the Texas Energy and Power Newsletter. In Texas, CenterPoint ranked among the worst utilities for power outages and one of the worst in the country for energy efficiency. The Texas grocery chain H-E-B even installed backup generators at its Houston-area stores specifically because of CenterPoint’s unreliable service.

Lewin noted that CenterPoint is a government-regulated public utility and so a big part of the blame falls on regulators who didn’t hold the company accountable for shortfalls or provide adequate resources to maintain its operations. “This is systemic neglect,” Lewin said. “It has taken decades and generations to get to this point and it’s probably going to take decades to fix.”

But there are fixes, and some of the work can begin right away.

One is to deploy microgrids in vulnerable areas. This breaks the power grid down into smaller, independent blocks that can rely on more local power generation, particularly from sources like the wind and the sun. That means that if a major transmission line gets knocked down or roads become inaccessible, homes and businesses on a microgrid can keep their own lights on.

There’s also money available. The 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law includes $5 billion in grants to harden the power grid across the US against natural disasters and another $5 billion to make upgrades to improve reliability. Texas voters last year also approved $1.8 billion to build microgrids at critical facilities like hospitals. In April, Harris County, which encompasses Houston, alongside five other Texas municipalities, received $250 million in federal funds to deploy residential solar power for low-income residents.

“This isn’t that hard. The technology is there,” Lewin said. “One year from now, we should have microgrids in Houston, Corpus Christi, Brownsville, all up and down the coast.”

The bigger challenge may be changing Houston’s attitudes toward regulations and coordination around the power grid and disaster planning rather than the ad hoc, go-it-alone approach that’s dominated the region for years. “Some of those solutions require a bit more planning,” Pinto said. “Those things have been kind of a taboo in a place like Texas.”