Texas runs a deregulated retail electricity market, so Houston homeowners shop for a
retail provider — but no matter whose name is on the bill,
CenterPoint Energy owns the poles, wires,
and substations that actually deliver the power and put it back after a storm. When people in
Harris County talk about the grid failing, this is the grid they mean — and the one a backup
generator for your Houston home insulates you from.
Natural gas is the other half of the picture. CenterPoint
Energy also distributes natural gas across much of the metro, which makes natural-gas
standby power unusually practical here — a great many homes can fuel a unit off the line
that’s already in the ground, with nothing to refill mid-outage.
Behind CenterPoint sits a second, deeper problem:
ERCOT, the Texas grid that runs largely
isolated from the rest of the country. That isolation is exactly why Winter Storm Uri turned
into a statewide blackout in 2021 instead of importing power from neighboring grids. Houston
sits downstream of both failure points — local lines and the grid itself.
A permanently installed standby generator answers all of it. It senses the outage and brings
the house back — usually within a minute — and keeps running as long as the power’s down,
whether that’s a summer thunderstorm or a week after a hurricane.
See how installation works →
Still weighing whether it’s worth it?
Read “Do I need a standby generator?” →