From Crisis to Transformation: CenterPoint Energy’s Post-Beryl Blueprint for Resilience
By Russ Henderson, Director of Research
When Hurricane Beryl struck Houston in July 2024, more than two million CenterPoint Energy customers lost power. The storm didn’t just take down lines — it exposed how much utilities must evolve to withstand the pace and power of modern disasters.
In a compelling keynote address earlier this month at PowerUp: Chartwell’s Outage Conference in Dallas, Don Daigler, Senior Vice President of Emergency Preparedness and Response at CenterPoint Energy, described how the company turned one of its toughest challenges into a catalyst for transformation. Within months of the storm, CenterPoint launched the Greater Houston Resiliency Initiative (GHRI) — an enterprise-wide effort to harden infrastructure, modernize systems, and strengthen coordination from the control room to the community.
Daigler emphasized that resilience is no longer just about weathering hurricanes. It’s about all hazards — from cyber to wildfire — and it requires a shared operational mindset. “You can’t just do what you do every day, but faster,” he said. “You need to think differently, make faster decisions, and train everyone — from executives to field crews — to operate with the same clarity and confidence.”
That culture shift is already paying off. Early indicators show major reductions in outage minutes across CenterPoint’s territory, thanks to accelerated automation, vegetation management, and the integration of advanced situational awareness tools. The $2.7 billion System Resiliency Plan, approved by regulators in August 2025, marks one of the largest grid-hardening efforts in Texas history.
More importantly, the initiative reflects a growing industry movement: to measure resilience not only in infrastructure metrics, but in organizational readiness and public trust.
CenterPoint’s journey is still unfolding — and for utilities across North America, it offers a powerful example of how strategic leadership and structured preparedness can turn crisis into capability.
A full case study on this topic, CenterPoint Energy: Building Resilience After Hurricane Beryl, will soon be published in the Research Center of Chartwell’s Utility Resilience Institute.
To learn more about CURI, please get in touch with Tim Herrick.
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