CenterPoint Energy conducts full-scale emergency exercise in preparation for 2026 hurricane season
Emergency exercise, constructing on CenterLevel’s year-round emergency preparedness actions and drills, simulated a response to a serious hurricane to strengthen future preparedness, coordination with native emergency companies and first responders, in addition to public and buyer communications
HOUSTON, May 14, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Today, as a part of an ongoing effort to strengthen its general emergency preparedness and response efforts, CenterLevel Energy performed its annual full-scale emergency response exercise in preparation for the upcoming hurricane season. The emergency exercise, held at CenterLevel’s Emergency Operations Center, simulated a Category 3 hurricane impacting the Greater Houston space and included greater than 400 members of CenterLevel groups – from Electric and Gas Operations, Emergency Planning & Response, Customer, Communications and others – executing the corporate’s emergency response plan. About 100 state and native officers, emergency administration officers, first responder companions and emergency consultants noticed the drill.
“For CenterPoint, preparing for natural disasters before they happen and simulating the effectiveness of our response and plans is vital to continuously improving and strengthening our response when future storms and hurricanes strike. Today’s emergency exercise builds on the series of preparedness actions we’ve already taken throughout the year, as well as the continued infrastructure investments made as part of our Greater Houston Resiliency Initiative to strengthen the electric grid. The combination of actions we’ve taken are to help us better achieve the high level of performance expected of us, so we can restore power safely and more quickly for the millions of customers and families who depend on us,” stated Jesus Soto Jr., Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, CenterLevel Energy.
2026 Preparedness: Focus of annual full-scale exercise
The 2026 emergency exercise targeted on executing a collection of crucial emergency response actions, together with reviewing climate forecasts and impacts, analyzing harm prediction fashions to deploy sources, coordinating with emergency responders to assist unified response operations, and speaking correct and well timed data to prospects, in addition to native and state leaders, on the dimensions of restoration efforts and progress.
The exercise simulated a Category 3 hurricane and included third-party skilled evaluators that noticed and offered suggestions. CenterLevel will use the suggestions to additional enhance, improve and strengthen CenterLevel’s emergency response preparedness, reflecting its year-round dedication to implementing the most recent greatest practices and classes realized following all emergency occasions, together with hurricanes and different excessive storms.
More than 100 officers noticed the exercise, together with elected leaders, representatives from regional emergency administration places of work, Houston-area utilities, in addition to key stakeholders from native schooling, healthcare and enterprise communities.
2026 Preparedness: Scope of emergency actions thus far
CenterLevel has taken a collection of actions all through 2026 to organize for the upcoming hurricane season. Actions embody:
- Opened a brand new Emergency Operations Center to assist CenterLevel’s year-round situational consciousness and emergency response readiness and carefully coordinate with emergency response companions, native and state officers, media and different key stakeholders.
- Completed greater than 25,000 hours of FEMA trainings throughout greater than 800 staff.
- Increased the variety of frontline staff CenterLevel can name upon to assist emergency responses by as much as 20 instances its regular workforce.
- Improved the harm evaluation course of with sooner harm identification and energy restoration.
- Enhanced real-time climate monitoring with 150 new superior climate stations.
Greater Houston Resiliency Initiative (GHRI): Strengthening the grid
Since launching GHRI in 2024, CenterLevel has made a collection of crucial infrastructure investments to strengthen the grid to raised stand up to extra excessive climate and enhance day-to-day reliability for its prospects. These ongoing actions, as a part of GHRI, have included:
- Installing 65,000+ stronger, extra storm-resilient poles;
- Clearing 10,000+ 1000’s of higher-risk vegetation close to energy strains;
- Undergrounding 500+ 1000’s of energy strains; and
- Installing 600+ automation units able to self-healing.
Throughout 2026, CenterLevel will proceed to make extra investments to additional strengthen system resiliency and emergency preparedness. These mixed resiliency actions will stop CenterLevel prospects from experiencing 150 million fewer outage minutes by the top of 2026.
To study extra about CenterLevel’s preparedness actions and important resiliency enhancements throughout Greater Houston, go to: www.CenterPointEnergy.com/TakingAction.
About CenterLevel Energy, Inc.
As the one investor owned electrical and gasoline utility primarily based in Texas, CenterLevel Energy, Inc. (NYSE: CNP) is an power supply firm with electrical transmission and distribution, energy era and pure gasoline distribution operations that serve greater than 7 million metered prospects in Indiana, Minnesota, Ohio and Texas. As of March 31, 2026, the corporate owned roughly $47.8 billion in property. With roughly 8,800 staff, CenterLevel Energy and its predecessor corporations have been in enterprise for greater than 150 years. For extra data, go to CenterLevelEnergy.com.
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