Some 640,000 Texans still without power

NEW YORK (Reuters) - More than 640,000 customers in Texas remained without power on Tuesday, 10 days after Hurricane Ike hit the Gulf Coast before cutting a destructive path all the way to New York.

CenterPoint Energy Inc, the power company for most of the Houston area, still had about 616,000 customers in Texas without power early Tuesday, down from 2.15 million at the height of the storm.

Last week, CenterPoint predicted its team of restoration workers would return power to most of the Houston area by Thursday. But the company could not estimate when it will return service to homes and businesses along the Gulf Coast, including Galveston, where the storm made landfall early on September 13.

CenterPoint estimated the total cost for the restoration would be the range of $350 million to $500 million. The company said in a federal filing it would defer uninsured costs related to the storm and would seek legislation in Texas to allow for the securitization of storm restoration costs.

In addition, the company said it expected the outages would hurt its earnings for the third quarter and full year, primarily due to reduced revenues. CenterPoint however could not determine the exact amount of that impact at this time.

Entergy Corp, the other hard-hit power provider in Texas, said it had just 31,000 customers still without power in eastern Texas, down from 392,000 affected.

Entergy expects to restore power to all Texas customers over this weekend.

CenterPoint and Entergy Texas said Ike knocked out service to about 99 percent of their Texas customers.

Ike hit the Galveston-Houston area as a Category 2 storm with winds of 110 mph. Overall, the storm cut power to more than 7.7 million homes and businesses in Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Ontario, Pennsylvania, Texas and West Virginia as it marched from Texas to the Northeast from September 12 to 19.

CenterPoint, of Houston, transmits and distributes electricity to more than 2.1 million customers in Texas and natural gas to more than 3 million homes and businesses in Arkansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Texas.

Entergy, of New Orleans, owns and operates about 30,000 MW of generating capacity, markets energy commodities, and transmits and distributes power to 2.7 million customers in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.

(Reporting by Scott DiSavino; Editing by John Picinich)