Severe thunderstorms tore through Greater Houston on Friday afternoon, knocking out power to more than 52,000 customers and bringing over 24,000 cloud-to-ground lightning strikes to the region. By 7 p.m., CenterPoint Energy crews had restored power to about 30,000 customers, though fewer than 20,000 remained in the dark as repair work stretched into the night.
Wind gusts reached 40 to 50 mph in at least seven locations during the outbreak, according to CW39 Houston, which first reported the outage figures Friday evening. CenterPoint crews and contractors said they would continue restoration efforts throughout the evening until all customers were back online, and the station noted that customers could track outages and estimated restoration times through the utility's outage tracker. Separately, the Houston Chronicle put the peak outage total at more than 52,000 customers before it fell to roughly 14,000 by 7 p.m., with more than 350 workers conducting repairs overnight.
The storm also snapped an eight-day streak of 100-degree-or-higher temperatures in Houston, a run that ranked among the ten longest extreme heat streaks in the city's recorded history, the Chronicle reported. That prolonged heat had put sustained pressure on the regional electric grid in the days leading up to Friday's storms.
Localized Cells Triggered Warnings Near Hockley
The afternoon system wasn't uniform across the region. The National Weather Service issued Severe Thunderstorm Warnings for Northwest Harris County and Central Waller County as localized cells produced damaging winds and hail near Hockley and surrounding areas, according to KHOU 11. Those pockets of intense weather contributed to the scattered nature of the outages reported across CenterPoint's territory.
CenterPoint's service area gives some sense of scale for Friday's disruption. The utility operates nearly 60,000 circuit miles of power lines across a 5,000-square-mile footprint in Greater Houston, serving 2.8 million metered customers who account for roughly a quarter of the total electric load across the ERCOT grid, according to filings with the Public Utility Commission of Texas.
Grid Upgrades Follow Years of Storm Scrutiny
Friday's outages arrived against the backdrop of a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar effort to harden that grid. In August 2025, the Public Utility Commission of Texas approved a $2.7 billion Systemwide Resiliency Plan for CenterPoint, trimmed down from an initial $5.75 billion request, allowing the company to pursue grid-hardening investments over three years, as detailed by Utility Dive. That plan followed a 2023 state law requiring utilities to file formal risk-mitigation strategies.
Much of that spending traces back to the costly aftermath of the May 2024 Houston Derecho, which caused more than $5 billion in regional damage. CenterPoint later filed with state regulators to recover $450 million in emergency response and repair costs from that storm over 15 years, per PR Newswire. Industry trade publication T&D World reported in May 2026 that CenterPoint had installed more than 62,000 storm-resilient utility poles and buried over 520 miles of power lines across Greater Houston between August 2024 and April 2026, part of a broader plan to replace or brace 130,000 poles in total.
A third-party evaluation by consulting firm Guidehouse, cited in 2025 utility filings, projected that the resiliency plan's measures — including grid automation and vegetation management — would cut total storm-related outage duration for Greater Houston customers by more than 900 million minutes by 2029. CenterPoint has also been testing its readiness directly: in May, the utility staged a hurricane drill simulating a Category 3 storm response with 400 employees and 100 emergency officials to test automated self-healing power lines and rapid deployment systems.
Regulators Pushed for Better Storm Communication
State oversight of CenterPoint intensified after 2024's Hurricane Beryl left large swaths of Houston without power for days and drew sharp public criticism over outage-tracking failures. The Public Utility Commission of Texas published a report that November recommending mandatory pre-storm communication procedures and requiring utilities to simulate high web traffic on outage trackers during annual emergency drills, according to Click2Houston.
Whether Friday's storm response reflects measurable progress from those upgrades remains an open question for now. What's clear is that Houston-area customers were directed back to CenterPoint's outage tracker to monitor restoration times as crews worked overnight to bring the last of the affected households and businesses back online.
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