Less Than 1 Year After Touting Its Investments In "Resilience", Entergy System Collapses During Ida

[hatrack]

Louisiana’s largest utility company recently completed a $100 million upgrade to the region’s electrical grid, proclaiming in a news release that the new equipment was a model of “storm resiliency” throughout the region. When Hurricane Ida hit, hundreds of power substations went down and a 400-foot transmission tower collapsed on the bank of the Mississippi River — a symbol to some Louisianans of the futility of an energy monopoly that has not moved quickly enough to guard against the extreme weather that pummels this region with growing frequency.

Entergy, the power provider for 3 million customers in the Gulf region, has over the past decade been fined for deferring maintenance of its aging infrastructure and criticized for moving too slowly to reinforce its grid against severe weather. The company resisted calls to increase investments in renewable energy sources, which climate advocates see as a way to prevent widespread outages. “I’m just outraged that this did not have to happen,” says Monique Harden, a longtime New Orleans resident whose nonprofit group, the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, has pushed Entergy to invest more in solar power. “There could have been built-in redundancies in our electric system.”

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Regulators say the company has fallen behind on making the necessary investments to prevent outages. A decade after Katrina, the New Orleans City Council complained the company had yet to provide it with “a comprehensive, detailed storm hardening plan,” including detailed costs, a timeline and benefits. During a council meeting in 2018, an Entergy executive admitted to deliberately reducing the company’s investment in the power grid by about $1 million, because, she said, the company was seeing strong performance and “we didn’t want to spend money on a system that was performing extremely well,” according to notes included in a City Council report.

According to the report, Entergy’s New Orleans division spent $10.5 million on distribution in 2015, down from $11.7 million the year before. In the years that followed, the unit steadily increased spending on distribution. That slight drop in funding was responsible for an increase in customer power outages from 2013 to 2017, according to the report. The regulator fined Entergy $1 million and asked it to increase investments in the grid.

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In 2019, the company threatened litigation if the council accepted the proposals advocated by the coalition, known as Energy Future New Orleans. “Entergy fought that effort as hard as I’ve seen a utility fight anything politically,” said David Pomerantz, executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute, an industry watchdog group. “They have a scorched earth opposition to these things.” The environmentalists also lost a battle to stop Entergy from building a $210 million gas plant a few years ago, despite embarrassing revelations that the utility hired a contractor who paid actors to speak in favor of the plan. The city fined Entergy $5 million over the scandal. The company disputed the council’s ability to levy the fine but agreed to pay the $5 million to repair the relationship with the council and the community.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/08/31/ida-entergy-hurricane-louisiana-power/

[lark]

1. They will pay off the governor, like the Energy co. in Tx did, & nothing will happen.

TX & LA both lack critical investment because they have companies that pay off the politicians and both are profiting from the deal. Who isn't profiting, the people of those states. Guarantee that nothing will change in LA, just as it didn't in TX and both states are still ripe for devastation again & again.

Coastal Southern states are terrible in all the ways they fail to protect us. Just in my city, all the old parts of town have transmission lines above ground and in all the newer areas the lines are underground and those areas don't lose power in every storm like the rest of us. I'm sure this pattern is everywhere, I saw lots of aboveground power lines last week when we were driving to, staying and coming back from the Keys. Why don't the states bury them? Because it won't help the richest directly, because they live in the new expensive areas and it would actually take a bit of $$ from them to do this. Most of the rich are repugs actually disdain/loathe the working class and don't care if they live or die and will not spend one dime of their ungodly sums of $$ for the general assistance. They are dispicable!~

[msongs]

2. videos showed some of their transmission towers were made primarily of...rust nt