Severe weather is expected again across much of Minnesota on Thursday, but the storms are not expected to be as powerful as those that hit the state earlier this week.

“These storms are expected to be weaker than Monday’s storms,” ​​the National Weather Service said, but they could still bring damaging winds and heavy rain.

Large hail and a few tornadoes are also possible as supercells develop along a cold front moving through Minnesota beginning Thursday afternoon, the Storm Prediction Center said. The center has placed an area stretching from north of Brainerd to the Iowa border under a slight severe weather risk, meaning there is a 2 in 5 chance of severe storms.

Cities included in the advisory include Minneapolis and St. Paul, Alexandria, Mora, St. Cloud, Redwood Falls, Red Wing, Mankato, Owatonna, Austin, Albert Lea, Worthington and Rochester. The advisory also includes western Wisconsin, the Storm Prediction Center said.

Storms are expected to pick up in western Minnesota after lunch and intensify rapidly as they move west to east. Storms are expected to reach the metro area by 5 p.m., the Weather Service said.

The threat of more storms comes as Xcel Energy works to bring back online the last customers who lost power during storms with 60 mph winds Monday and Tuesday. About 3,700 customers in the Twin Cities were still in the dark Thursday morning, the utility reported. The largest number of outages remained in hard-hit St. Paul, where 1,600 customers still had no power, according to the utility’s online outage map.

According to Xcel Energy spokesperson Theo Keith, these customers should have power restored by Thursday evening.

More than 250,000 homes in the metro area lost power in the past 48 hours, but 95% of those have power restored. About 1,800 workers have replaced the equivalent of 14 miles of wire and more than 250 utility poles in the past two days, Keith said.