How a Southern utility guards its monopoly -- and endangers the power grid, critics say
Like many ravaging storms that came before it, Hurricane Ida exposed the fragility of Louisiana’s power grid, knocking out electricity to hundreds of thousands of people and businesses, including nearly all of New Orleans. It also laid bare growing doubts about the ability of the state’s largest energy provider to protect against the effects of climate change, including the increasingly destructive weather it causes.
The company, Entergy Corp., has told regulators and shareholders that it is committed to protecting the grid against extreme weather, having spent billions of dollars to upgrade towers, poles and lines.
But Entergy also has a history of resisting changes that would have made the electric grid more resilient, from developing new transmission lines to expanding solar power, according to an examination of regulatory filings and other public documents and interviews with industry researchers and clean-power proponents.
These actions show that while Entergy isn’t opposed to renewable power, it fights projects it doesn’t control and doesn’t want competition from other companies or homeowners trying to generate their own power from the sun. That has angered local elected officials and environmental advocates, who say Entergy is blocking needed change to maintain its dominance of the local energy market.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/hurricane-ida-power-grid-failure-forces-reckoning-over-entergy-s-n1279971
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Because EVERYTHING gotta be for-profit in the USA!