HOUSTON — CenterPoint Energy’s new outage tracker map went live overnight after their original one went down following the derecho storm in May.
This comes after CEO Jason Wells went before Texas lawmakers again on Wednesday telling the members of the House Committee on State Affairs that he took personal responsibility for the outages after Hurricane Beryl.
Wells had set an Aug. 1 deadline for the new outage tracker to go live online. CenterPoint says the goal is to ensure that customers have the information they need when they need it.
CHECK OUTAGES: CenterPoint's new outage tracker map
CenterPoint added that the new tracker would be more customer-oriented, provide more complete information during storms, and handle increased demand during weather events.
CenterPoint Sr. Vice President Tony Gardner said there are new features with the map.
"Like toggling off weather, toggling on different satellite views and street views to make it easier for them so they can cross reference where they are," he said.
CenterPoint said the new outage tracker is cloud-based and mobile-friendly. The outage tracker features include:
- Up-to-date: Data is updated to the tracker every five minutes. They added that a customer's outage status may not change, as it will update once new restoration information is available.
- Mobile-friendly interface: Easy to use on cell phones or tablets.
- Weather integration: Includes a weather integration layer to see how weather may be impacting outages.
- Improved reliability: The tracker is cloud-based. This allows it to be scalable for growth, increased web traffic, and enhanced performance.
- Summary reporting: Provides a summary of outages by county, city, and ZIP code.
- Street and satellite views: This feature helps customers better understand the vegetation density in their area that may impact outages.
"We relaunched our outage tracker as a cloud-based solution, so that has autoscaling abilities ... meaning it can handle a lot of traffic as customers start hitting our webpage at one time to get the information they need," Gardner said.
CenterPoint provided a walkthrough of how to use the new outage tracker: