Hurricane Beryl: An open letter to our customers

By Eliecer Viamontes 
President & CEO Entergy Texas, Inc. 

We sincerely appreciate your patience and understanding as our dedicated teams worked tirelessly to restore power to the areas affected by Hurricane Beryl. Our employees know firsthand the hardships for customers caused by power outages, especially during the summer, and I want to personally express my gratitude for your unwavering support as we strived to bring power back to over 252,000 affected customers. 

 The impact of Hurricane Beryl was severe, with heavy rain, peak wind gusts up to 97 miles per hour, and even a tornado hitting the Entergy Texas service area, resulting in widespread debris and damage to our electrical system – mainly driven by fallen trees and vegetation. Thanks to the efforts of more than 2,500 restoration workers, we were able to make repairs and restore power to nearly all impacted customers just one week after Hurricane Beryl’s landfall. This included repairing more than the distance between Conroe and Austin in downed power lines.

In addition to our restoration efforts, we also donated $125,000 to the American Red Cross for storm relief and actively promoted cooling centers across our service area to further support our communities during this challenging time. 

 Our commitment is to provide safe, reliable, and affordable power to our communities, even amidst extreme weather events. With storms impacting the Gulf Coast region more frequently and with greater intensity, we are making even more strategic investments to strengthen the Southeast Texas power grid. In June of this year, we filed an application with the Public Utility Commission of Texas for approval of Phase I of our comprehensive Texas Future Ready Resiliency Plan. Once approved, the plan will benefit customers by decreasing future storm restoration costs by approximately $129 million and reducing the duration of power outages following significant weather events like hurricanes by 4.5 billion minutes over the next 50 years. 

Thank you again for your continued trust and support.