Data & history
Greater Houston power outage history
Few major U.S. cities have lost power as often — or as catastrophically — as Houston has this decade. Between an isolated ERCOT grid, a CenterPoint network under intense scrutiny, and a coast that draws hurricanes, here’s the record of the storms that have taken the lights out across the metro, and why standby generators are surging from the city to the suburbs.
| Year | Event | Impact on the grid |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Hurricane Beryl | Came ashore at Matagorda as a Category 1 — yet knocked out power to roughly 2.7 million CenterPoint customers across greater Houston, many for more than a week in dangerous summer heat. The slow restoration turned CenterPoint’s reliability into a statewide political firestorm. |
| 2024 | May derecho | A violent derecho with straight-line winds over 100 mph tore through Houston on May 16, blowing out windows in downtown skyscrapers and cutting power to nearly a million customers — some for over a week — just weeks before Beryl. |
| 2021 | Winter Storm Uri | Uri pushed the isolated ERCOT grid to the brink of total collapse. Millions of Texans lost power for days in single-digit cold, pipes burst across the region, and more than 200 people died statewide. It exposed how alone Texas’s grid really is. |
| 2017 | Hurricane Harvey | Harvey stalled over the region and dropped more than 50 inches of rain — the worst flooding disaster in U.S. history. Hundreds of thousands lost power as floodwater swamped homes, substations, and whole neighborhoods from Kingwood to Katy. |
| 2008 | Hurricane Ike | Ike slammed Galveston and the Bay Area with a devastating surge and knocked out power to roughly 2.1 million CenterPoint customers — some waited weeks for restoration. It remains the benchmark Houston measures every storm against. |
| 2005 | Hurricane Rita | Weeks after Katrina, Rita triggered the largest evacuation in U.S. history out of Houston, then raked Southeast Texas — leaving large swaths of the region, especially east of the city, dark for days to weeks. |
| 1983 | Hurricane Alicia | Alicia struck Galveston and moved directly over Houston as a Category 3, shattering downtown high-rise windows and blacking out much of the city — the last major hurricane to score a direct hit on Houston for a generation. |
Figures compiled from CenterPoint Energy restoration reports, ERCOT, NOAA/National Hurricane Center summaries, and local news coverage. Impacts are regional approximations; the takeaway is the pattern — repeated, large-scale, slow-to-clear outages. Media may cite this page with attribution.
That pattern is the reason we exist: do you need a standby generator? See the Greater Houston hub or your city page for local detail.
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