Laura Norton’s home lost power for two days after Hurricane Beryl hit Houston in July; not a bad score, considering that some neighborhoods didn’t have electricity restored for a week or more. Still, even in The Woodlands, one of the city’s wealthiest suburbs, people were struggling.

“Like everyone else, I drove around assessing for damage,” Norton says. “There were all these long lines at the stations from people trying to get gas. Some of them weren’t even open.”

Norton, in her 2023 Hyundai Ioniq, didn’t have to worry about gas because her car is fully electric. Despite widespread power outages in Houston after recent weather disasters, electric vehicles (EVs) have withstood the storms remarkably well.

Performance of electrical devices of any kind during widespread power failure is a concern on every Houstonian’s mind these days. Since 2021, three catastrophic storms—Winter Storm Uri, the derecho, and Hurricane Beryl—have struck the city and caused blackouts for millions that have lasted days or weeks depending on the area. Texas’s electrical grid is notoriously isolated, though the Biden administration is spending $360 million on a 320-mile project to connect part of the state to grids in Louisiana and Mississippi. Even with the change, the power problems will remain.

Norton fully charged her car before Beryl. At no point during the blackout did she need a recharge. A retired CPA and amateur pickleball player, her daily commute is short and easily handled by her EV, even with no access to power for days.

“My longest commute is seven miles,” she says. “It was a week before I needed to recharge.”

Similarly, Anthony Chapman, a supervisor at energy company Enbridge who drives a 2019 Tesla Model 3, managed well in the four powerless days after Beryl and three during the May derecho. As instructed in the manual, he always keeps his EV charged above 50 percent to preserve battery life (drivers are also not supposed to regularly charge to 100 percent for this reason). He was prepared when the derecho came suddenly. In fact, he ended up bringing supplies to people with gasoline-powered cars who hadn’t filled up.

“Because of some city flooding, I was still restricted, but it allowed me to get over to friends’ houses and help out people who needed rides,” he says. “I felt very lucky.”

EVs came to the rescue several times in Houston post-storm. A TikTok user named Misssbaaah filmed a Tesla Cybertruck powering a gas station’s registers and pumps after Beryl. Ford F-150 Lightnings were also used as mobile generators powering homes and businesses, according to Ford CEO Jim Farley. The vehicle puts out four times the power of its gasoline-powered counterpart and can power electrical equipment. Though shoring up the city’s energy structure is not what they were designed for, EVs can do it in small ways in a pinch.

Evolve, a Houston-based EV rideshare provider and nonprofit, seeks to reduce transportation pollution in the city through providing electric vehicles and raising awareness about the benefits of EVs. The company was able to quickly resume operations after the two most recent storms, once it was safe.

“A seldom-discussed advantage of electric vehicles is their capacity to store and transport significant amounts of electricity,” says Evolve CEO Casey Brown. “The presence of electric vehicles in the market has opened up opportunities to increase resilience, as many Houstonians used, and can use, these vehicles for backup power, enhancing the resilience of both residents and businesses.”

It’s not perfect. Chapman’s Model 3 can’t run more than a couple of fans or a Wi-Fi router without draining the battery quickly. Powering his house’s air-conditioning or even the refrigerator was not possible. Larger models can run anything from freezers to dialysis machines, but more affordable sedans have more limited use.

Norton has a generator, which she decided to buy after experiencing blackouts during Hurricane Ike in 2008. It’s enough to recharge her car if necessary and also runs her house during outages.

“You can hardly afford the generator, but I got it after five days without power,” she says. “Three days was fine, but I just found the fourth and fifth day too mentally taxing. I saved until I could afford one in 2014.”

Chapman doesn’t have a generator yet. During the outages, he kept in touch with nearby friends who did have power and would let him top off his battery if needed, and there are around 800 charging stations in the greater Houston area open to the public. Around 50 of them are free to use and Chapman says he's never encountered a line while using them during times of crisis. Some of these are able to run off generators when the grid fails.

“I would have gone to find a place to have charge,” Chapman says. “In emergency situations, some Tesla supercharger stations are set up with diesel backups.”

Still, most Houstonians charge their EVs at home, and that can be a problem when the power fails. Unlike Chapman’s employer, most businesses don’t have EV charging stations, and they’re still rare in multifamily buildings and apartment complexes. This leaves thousands of Houstonians without convenient ways to use EVs in blackouts or at all.

Even aside from the storms, the Texas grid has repeatedly strained under demand in recent summers, driven by a combination of blistering heat, crypto mining, and the explosion of power-gobbling data centers. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) has had to plead with Texans to limit their use of energy. Some EV owners worry that they are contributing to the electrical system’s instability.

“Our electric grids are not prepared for the AI and data centers, so I do have some concern that I am taxing the grid too much,” Norton says. “I wish Texas would shore up and be a better provider of electricity.”