Storms Knock Out Power to Thousands on San Antonio's Far Northwest Side

Severe thunderstorms swept through San Antonio Thursday evening, knocking out power to thousands of CPS Energy customers and delaying the kickoff of the high school football season at stadiums across the city. The outages were concentrated on the far Northwest Side past Loop 410, with more than 6,400 customers reported without power at one point during the evening.

CPS Energy reported that more than 5,200 households and businesses had lost power as the storms moved through, according to KENS 5. The station, which maintains an outage map fed by CPS Energy data, reported the storms brought the first measurable rain of the month to the San Antonio area. As the nation's largest municipally owned electric and gas utility, CPS Energy serves more than 840,000 electric customers across a 1,566-square-mile territory spanning Bexar County and seven surrounding counties, according to Wikipedia.

Lightning Delays Opening Night of Football Season

The storms hit right as the 2026 Texas high school football season was set to kick off, and frequent lightning forced delays to the start of games at some arenas around the city. Comalander Stadium, which had a kickoff scheduled for 7 p.m., saw its own start pushed back because of the lightning threat, per the same account. The disruption extended beyond San Antonio proper, with the storms affecting scheduled openers across the region, as reported by SSBCrack News.

Thursday's outbreak followed a punishing stretch of heat that had gripped the city just a day earlier. On Wednesday, the National Weather Service had placed Bexar County under a Heat Advisory as afternoon temperatures reached 101 degrees with heat-index values climbing to 110 degrees, conditions that Hoodline previously reported set the stage for the atmospheric instability behind the pop-up storms. That kind of whiplash, from triple-digit heat to sudden severe thunderstorms, is a familiar late-summer pattern for South Texas.

A Recurring Vulnerability for the Grid

Thursday's blackouts are hardly an isolated event for CPS Energy's distribution system. On July 11, a severe summer thunderstorm knocked out power to more than 15,000 CPS Energy customers and forced the closure of over a dozen Bexar County roads due to flash flooding, according to KENS 5. An even larger event struck on May 26, when heavy thunderstorms paired with flash flood warnings left more than 18,000 customers without electricity across San Antonio, per MySA.

Those repeat outages come despite significant investment aimed at hardening the grid. CPS Energy is operating under a five-year, $6.2 billion capital improvement plan, with roughly 52% of that funding designated specifically for electric distribution and system infrastructure, according to S&P Global Ratings. The utility also issued a request for proposals in June for battery energy storage and microgrid technology in eastern and southern San Antonio, part of its Community Energy Resiliency program meant to protect localized grids during severe weather. In April, the CPS Energy Board of Trustees approved a $2.8 billion budget for Fiscal Year 2027, with about 70% of that spending directed toward power generation, new customer connections, and system reliability projects, as Hoodline previously reported.

What CPS Energy Customers Should Do

The far Northwest Side past Loop 410, where much of Thursday's damage concentrated, is among the fast-growing outer areas where CPS Energy's distribution grid remains especially susceptible to rapid wind and lightning impacts. CPS Energy customers can report outages by texting OUT to 47854, and anyone who spots a downed power line is urged to call 210-353-HELP immediately rather than approach it.

Thursday's storm arrived after an unusually wet stretch earlier in the year. San Antonio recorded its rainiest start to a year since 2016, logging 7.46 inches of rainfall in April and nearly 6 inches in May at San Antonio International Airport, according to the San Antonio Express-News. That soggy spring gave way to a dry August before Thursday's downpour broke the month's rainfall drought, underscoring how quickly South Texas weather can swing from drought to deluge and back again.