2026 Event Schedule

In just months, CenterPoint Energy has achieved significant milestones across its Greater Houston Resiliency Initiative (“GHRI”) — clearing more than 6,000 miles of higher-risk vegetation and installing 26,000 stronger, storm-resilient poles in critical areas. Central to this progress are sweeping gains in operational efficiency, including compressing network monitoring processes from a year and a half down to three hours. 

In this session, Eric Easton, VP of Grid Transformation at CenterPoint Energy, will share how the team is operationalizing advanced technology to drive resiliency success. The presentation will break down the plan’s core components and explain how they work together to deliver measurable, system-wide resiliency gains.

By modeling the entire network in a physics-based, AI-assisted digital twin, CenterPoint has surfaced critical insights into otherwise hidden risks such as non-right-of-way (“ROW”) vegetation and accessibility limitations — factors with broad implications across GHRI efforts. This intelligence now informs key resiliency processes such as pole replacement, vegetation management, and substation asset failure mitigation, improving consistency and accuracy across a wide range of field operations and the ability to forecast and backcast resiliency outcomes.

Non-ROW vegetation has long challenged utilities, as it falls outside direct maintenance jurisdiction, making risks harder to track. CenterPoint can now monitor non-ROW vegetation, empowering them with the data to better address hidden risks that utilities are often forced to let go unattended. Understanding accessibility limitations, for example, enables CenterPoint to prioritize remediating asset failure risks in less accessible locations based on criticality and total customer counts — and to respond more effectively during emergencies by ensuring crew deployment to accessible locations.