Thousands Still in the Dark; Restoration Costs More than $100M

Centerpoint Energy had hoped to have everyone’s lights back on by Wednesday. There are about 4,000 customers still in the dark as of Friday afternoon.

On its website, CenterPoint said that “Any remaining outages are predominantly isolated instances in certain locations where there is substantial damage or where customers are unable to receive power. CenterPoint has and will continue to have the workers and resources needed to address these remaining outages as safely and quickly as possible. In some cases, new outages may be attributable to service issues that periodically occur on CenterPoint's system and are unrelated to the weather event, such as a vehicle accident resulting in a downed pole and wires.”

“While we are very proud of the progress we have made over the course of our response to this storm event, we recognize that there are still Houstonians waiting to get their electricity back on," said Lynnae Wilson, Senior Vice President, Electric Business. “We want our customers to know we will continue our around-the-clock efforts until every last customer can be restored."

In the meantime, CenterPoint says restoration costs will be at least $100M, and plans to seek approval from the Public Utility Commission of Texas to issue bonds to recover its storm-related costs.