NEW ORLEANS – The following is a letter to utility regulators in New Orleans from Jesse George, New Orleans policy director, and Yvonne Cappel-Vickery, clean grid manager, both with the Alliance for Affordable Energy. In addition, on June 3 Biz Talks posted the podcast “Episode 241: The Latest Power Outage – What Happened? What We Need to Do? And Whose Bill Will See A Jump Soon? featuring an interview with Logan Atkinson Burke, executive director, Alliance for Affordable Energy.
“Dear New Orleans Utility Regulators,
The May 25th Entergy and Cleco load shed event left over 100,000 people in the dark. That event has become a subject of great concern to residents and businesses in Orleans, Jefferson, St. Tammany, Plaquemines and St. Bernard Parishes. Unfortunately, Louisiana already deals with increasingly unreliable and unaffordable electric utilities. Yet, shortly after the blackout took place, Entergy and others swiftly placed the blame elsewhere, suggesting that fault for what happened lies instead with the Midcontinent Independent Systems Operator (MISO).
While MISO ordered the load shed to limit larger outages, inaction by Entergy, Cleco, and their elected regulators created the conditions requiring those blackouts. It is crucial that our elected representatives, the members of the City Council of New Orleans and the Louisiana Public Service Commission, ensure that, in exchange for reasonable and approved profits for the regulated-monopoly utilities, residents and businesses are provided fair, affordable, and reliable electricity services.
This blackout could have potentially been avoided if regulators had been consistently pushing our regulated utilities to begin regional transmission planning and investments years ago. Instead of encouraging utilities to begin transmission planning Louisiana regulators have allowed costly consultants to quibble over cost allocation methodologies without finding a solution. While there are still unknowns about what exactly happened to require 600 megawatts of load to be shed, future load shed events can be prevented with short-term and long-term available solutions.
The Alliance recommends that our elected utility regulators ask Entergy, Cleco, and MISO the following set of questions. We are also encouraging your constituents and those impacted by the outages, to hold their regulators accountable. We believe the public has the right to answers to the following:
- How much additional revenue did Entergy make from the load shed event?
- What generation and transmission was offline as forced or unplanned outages?
- What is the expected rate impact for consumers?
- When will consumer rates be affected due to the load shed event?
- Will our regulators require Entergy and Cleco to engage in long term regional transmission planning and intraregional planning?
- Will the New Orleans City Council and Louisiana Public Service Commission revisit emergency demand response resources and protocols as a short term solution?
- What oversight is the New Orleans City Council and the Louisiana Public Service Commission providing to make sure these types of mistakes will not occur again?
- Ratepayers should not be financially responsible for Entergy’s failure. How will Entergy and Cleco be held accountable?
- How will ratepayers be protected from any excess charges associated with the May 25, 2025 blackout?
- How can energy efficiency programs and demand-side management programs in general be structured to reduce peak demand? – Can emergency demand-response programs be activated immediately when reserves tighten?
- How much headroom did MISO think was secured going into the Memorial Day Weekend? – If it was known that the Riverbend nuclear facility was offline, why did Entergy and MISO believe conservative operations were not necessary?
- Does MISO use the GFS Meteorology model?
- Share information regarding the River Bend facility offline status beginning on May 21, 2025 to May 26, 2025.
- What specific transmission constraints currently exist within MISO South?
- FERC Order 1920 requires long term regional transmission planning – how are we fulfilling that mandate?
- What short-lead-time transmission upgrades (flexible line rating, temporary reconductoring) are available that can relieve constraints within the Louisiana Amite South and Downstream of Gypsy load pockets?
- Why didn’t Entergy identify the risk of the load shed event happening when it scheduled the generator outages? Temperatures were high but were not outside what Louisiana utilities should be planning for. Has a forecasting error or gap been identified?
- Are the new transmission projects that Entergy is moving through MISO’s bottom-up approval process, MISO Transmission Expansion Plan (MTEP), designed to mitigate the risk of a load shed event happening again? If so, please demonstrate how Entergy’s MTEP projects mitigate risk of future load shed events?
- Was there a quick change in demand that precipitated the 3 minute notice? a) If a sudden load change happens in the future, (due to something like a data center or industrial ramping) could that cause more vulnerability to load shed? b) If a sudden loss of a transmission asset happens in future, could that cause more vulnerability to load shed?
- Why have regulators not required Entergy to pursue divestment of its transmission infrastructure per the conditions set by the United States Department of Justice in 2012?
- Will this outage be included in the calculation of Entergy New Orleans’ SAIDI and SAIFI ratings for purposes of determining compliance with existing reliability standards for this year? If not, why not?
The future of New Orleans will be shaped in large part by decisions we make today and in the coming months about how we meet the needs of our city and state. Transmission planning, done well, will be critical to ensuring that we have a reliable, affordable, and sustainable electric grid that meets our needs. If you have any questions or would like to discuss further, please contact Yvonne Cappel-Vickery at yvonne@all4energy.org.”
