CenterPoint Energy hosted its Technology Summit with seven organizations in AI tools, data analytics and other technologies to build the most resilient coast grid in the country, and to better serve its 2.8 million customers throughout the 2025 hurricane season and beyond.
The strategic relationships with Climavision, Convey (formerly Message Broadcast), Neara, Palantir, Pano AI, Technosylva and Urbint will help CenterPoint improve overall operations, identify critical system upgrades, enhance situational awareness, and strengthen storm preparedness and emergency response efforts.
"These global leaders are enabling CenterPoint to leverage the latest innovations in AI, machine learning and other areas to help Houston be better prepared for more powerful hurricanes and storms,” said Jason Wells, President and Chief Executive Officer of CenterPoint Energy. “Most importantly, these new technologies and tools will help us respond more effectively to emergencies and provide the more reliable, resilient service our customers expect and deserve."
During the 2025 Technology Summit, representatives of CenterPoint and global tech leaders engaged with elected officials, local emergency managers and community leaders to demonstrate the role of advanced technologies to enhance CenterPoint's efforts to prepare for extreme weather events, including in four areas:
- Targeting critical system upgrades: Working with Neara and Technosylva , CenterPoint is enhancing how it plans and executes targeted resiliency actions to strengthen the system against extreme weather.
- Improving situational awareness and storm preparedness: Climavision and Pano AI are helping CenterPoint improve real-time weather monitoring, AI forecasting and risk detection, enabling CenterPoint to more effectively predict and monitor weather risks to Houston's energy infrastructure.
- Keeping customers better informed: CenterPoint is using critical tools from Convey to modernize communication operations and efficiently manage interactions, strengthening the company's ability to deliver real-time emergency communications to millions of customers.
- Strengthening emergency response: Technologies from Palantir and Urbint are helping CenterPoint connect data across its assets to respond to storms more effectively and enhancing onboarding and deployment of mutual assistance crews in an emergency.
CenterPoint's strategic technology relationships are the latest part of a broader series of actions to improve resiliency, communication and partnerships through the Greater Houston Resiliency Initiative (GHRI), launched in August 2024.
Over the first two phases of GHRI, which were completed before schedule and the start of hurricane season on June 1, CenterPoint took the following actions:
- Installed 26,000+ stronger, storm-resilient poles to withstand extreme winds;
- Added 5,150+ automation devices to improve restoration times;
- Cleared 6,000+ miles of higher-risk vegetation to reduce storm-related outages;
- Undergrounded 400+ miles of power lines to improve overall resiliency;
- Installed 100+ weather stations across our service territory to improve situational awareness and storm preparation;
- Donated 21 backup generators to critical facilities across the company's 12-county service area; and
- Launched a new and improved, cloud-based Outage Tracker to provide real-time updates on outages and restoration efforts in English and Spanish.
The company will continue working throughout the 2025 hurricane season to further strengthen resiliency and address potential system impacts from storms and extreme weather.
