CenterPoint launches Community Progress Tracker, showing Houston-area grid hardening work by neighborhood and ZIP code

A new public-facing map for a long-running resiliency buildout

CenterPoint Energy has launched an online “Community Progress Tracker” designed to let residents across its Greater Houston service territory view electric-grid upgrades at a neighborhood level. The tool is structured as an interactive map and is intended to provide location-specific visibility into grid-hardening work that has been underway since 2024 as part of the company’s Greater Houston Resiliency Initiative.

The tracker is accessible on desktop and mobile devices and includes search functions by street address and ZIP code. It displays icons tied to categories of work such as pole and equipment upgrades, vegetation management, undergrounding and grid-automation deployments. At launch, the map focuses on work completed since Aug. 1, 2024, with the company stating that additional features are planned to show projects in progress and those scheduled next.

What the tracker shows so far

The map aggregates multiple types of upgrades that CenterPoint says it has delivered across a 12-county service area. The company has described these items as part of a broader effort to reduce outage frequency and duration during severe weather and high-wind events that have repeatedly disrupted service in the Houston region.

• More than 56,000 storm-resilient poles installed since the initiative’s start period.
• Roughly 8,000 miles of vegetation clearing or tree trimming recorded in the dataset underlying the tracker.
• More than 400 miles of power lines undergrounded as part of the hardening program.
• Deployment of grid-automation and “self-healing” devices intended to isolate faults and restore service to unaffected segments faster.
• Installation of weather-monitoring infrastructure that the company says supports operational awareness during storms.

Context: reliability scrutiny and a larger regulated investment plan

The release of a public progress map follows heightened scrutiny of outage performance and communications after major weather events, including Hurricane Beryl in July 2024, which led to widespread and prolonged outages across the region. In the aftermath, CenterPoint launched multi-phase resiliency work and later advanced a broader 2026–2028 Systemwide Resiliency Plan for regulatory review.

State regulators have approved a multibillion-dollar resiliency plan for the Houston-area grid covering 2026 through 2028. That approved package includes measures such as additional storm-hardened poles, more undergrounding in targeted areas and more frequent vegetation management, with costs recovered through electric rates over time.

How residents can use the tool—and its current limits

For households, the tracker’s primary practical value is verification: residents can check whether upgrades are listed near a home, school, business corridor or along frequently impacted circuits. The map does not function as an outage tracker and does not guarantee that a specific neighborhood will avoid outages during future storms. Instead, it catalogs completed resiliency work and, as the company has outlined, is expected to expand to show work underway and planned.

CenterPoint has framed the tracker as a transparency measure, giving the public a localized way to follow grid-upgrade activity rather than relying on systemwide summaries.

As the tool evolves, its usefulness will depend on how frequently data are refreshed, how clearly project categories are defined, and whether planned-project timelines and locations are presented with enough detail for the public to evaluate progress across communities.