More than 2 million Houston-area customers without power, no clear ...

Nearly 2 million customers remained without power as of mid-afternoon Tuesday, as utility companies scrambled to restore electricity with temperatures topping 90 degrees.

The region’s three largest electric utilities each estimated that at least half of their customers would see power restored by the end of Wednesday.

About 1.66 million CenterPoint customers didn’t have power as of 2:15 p.m. Tuesday. About 843,000 customers had their power restored over the previous 24 hours, CenterPoint said.

In a Monday night press release, the utility, which serves nearly all of Harris and Fort Bend counties, estimated about 1 of the 2 million-plus customers who lost power would get service restored by the end of Wednesday. Harder-hit areas, however, could see “prolonged outages,” CenterPoint officials said.

The company hasn’t released a detailed timeline for restoring power, citing the ongoing work to assess damage to its electric systems. Hurricane Beryl “more heavily impacted” Houston’s electric infrastructure than originally anticipated, causing widespread flooding, infrastructure damage and at least four deaths. 

“We are mobilizing all of our available resources, as well as mutual assistance resources from other utility companies, to begin the process of quickly and safely restoring power to our customers,” said Lynnae Wilson, a senior vice president at CenterPoint, in the press release. “We understand how difficult it is to be without power for any amount of time, especially in the heat. We are laser focused on the important and time-sensitive work that lies ahead.”

Seven thousand partner crews were en route to Houston to aid CenterPoint’s 3,000 local employees as of Monday afternoon, said Paul Lock, the company’s manager of local government relations, at an afternoon press conference. 

Lock indicated that the company expects a clearer picture of the restoration timeline to emerge sometime Tuesday.

Suburban counties still out 

About 230,000 customers served by Entergy and Texas-New Mexico Power in Greater Houston’s suburban counties also were without power.

Entergy reported about 147,000 customers remained without power in Montgomery County as of 2 p.m. Tuesday. About 16,000 Entergy customers in Liberty County and 6,000 customers in Galveston County also were without power.

Entergy officials said they expected about half of their 219,000 customers without power as of Tuesday morning would see power restored by the end of Wednesday. The company said a more detailed timeline for remaining customers would arrive by Tuesday evening.

Texas-New Mexico Power reported about 38,000 customer outages in Galveston County and 34,000 customer outages in Brazoria County as of 1:30 p.m. The utility estimated that power would return for those customers by Wednesday evening.

CenterPoint outage tracker still not available 

As CenterPoint works to restore service to the region, the millions of Houstonians without power continue to lack a critical resource for tracking electrical outages and restoration timelines: CenterPoint’s Outage Tracker.

The Outage Tracker, a map of the Houston metro area highlighting areas affected by outages, has been offline since May due to “technical difficulties” caused by the derecho that swept through Harris County that month, CenterPoint officials said.

On Sunday, a CenterPoint representative said the company would replace the Outage Tracker with a “redesigned cloud-based platform” by the end of July. In the meantime, the company pointed to its Storm Center, which updates general outage information every fifteen minutes, and its Power Alert service, which provides community-specific restoration information via text, email or phone. 

But the lack of clarity around the extent of power outages and restoration timelines caused consternation among CenterPoint customers eager for updates after the derecho. 

CenterPoint maintains the systems that deliver power to nearly all residents of Harris and Fort Bend counties, along with some other corners of Greater Houston. In total, about 2.8 million Houstonians rely on CenterPoint, according to the company.

CenterPoint has long contended with major weather events resulting in widespread outages. Hurricane Ike, a Cat 2 storm that battered Greater Houston in 2008, resulted in power outages to nearly 2.2 million CenterPoint customers. Some were still without electricity nearly two weeks later.