HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) — As Hurricane Beryl downed power lines across southwest Texas, some utility poles remained standing, thanks to their advanced design. Edgar Castro, plant director at Resilient Structures, noted that the company’s composite poles, previously sold to CenterPoint, withstood the storm’s impact.
These poles, made from woven fiberglass, are hollow, allowing equipment and wires to be stored inside, protected from the elements. “We don’t know what kind of hurricanes or storms we will get in the future, but up to now, they have withstood all the recent hurricane activity and inclement weather that Houston has seen,” Castro said.
Resilient Structures has opened a distribution center in Humble to eventually manufacture these composite poles locally. CenterPoint has already purchased thousands of them, and according to Rob Krotee, executive VP at Resilient Structures, the poles remained standing after Beryl. “I don’t know if I would call them indestructible, but we’ve advertised and said we’ve never lost a pole to a weather event,” Krotee said.
Although each composite pole costs about $5,000, Resilient Structures claims they are cheaper to transport, install, and maintain, making them more cost-effective in the long run.
CenterPoint emphasized the importance of hardening its infrastructure, despite admitting that insufficient resiliency work was done before the recent Category 1 hurricane, which left millions without power. Jason Ryan, CenterPoint’s executive vice president of regulatory services and government affairs, mentioned that the company’s 1,000-page “Resiliency Plan” will help strengthen local infrastructure for future extreme weather events.
The plan, submitted to the Public Utilities Commission, is expected to be approved by the end of the year. CenterPoint plans to spend $376 million from 2025 to 2027 to harden its transmission system, including replacing old wooden poles with stronger composite ones. Over the past five years, the company has spent $1.46 billion on resiliency and expects to invest another $1.45 billion from 2025 to 2027.
“We are going to have to continue this resilience and spend over the course of the next decade to get to where we want to be with the increasingly extreme storms we are facing here in Houston,” Ryan said.
Castro highlighted that the composite poles can withstand up to 6,000 pounds of force, enough to survive a Category 5 hurricane. Even if soil conditions or foundations are compromised, stronger poles mean quicker restoration of utilities for residents. “You’ll start seeing them in your community. They’ve got a glossy feature; they’re brown by design. We’ve got them in different colors,” he said. “If you start seeing them in your community, that’s the effort from local leaders and utility providers to harden the grid in anticipation of these kinds of disruptive events.”
