Entergy New Orleans proposes plan to harden grid
Entergy New Orleans filed plans with the New Orleans City Council to harden the grid and make it more resilient.
Specifically, the filing includes a menu of options for the New Orleans City Council to consider, including grid resilience, hardening projects, and alternative technologies such as microgrids. These hardening projects are estimated to cost approximately $1.5 billion over 10 years.
The investment comes as the region has been hit hard by extreme weather the past two hurricane seasons, including Hurricanes Laura and Ida, two of the strongest hurricanes to hit Louisiana.
“While investments to harden the grid carry a significant cost, they result in substantial customer benefits in the long run,” Deanna Rodriguez, president and CEO of Entergy New Orleans, said. “Robust investments in grid resiliency will reduce the duration of power outages following major storms and will also reduce future storm restoration costs. Our objective is twofold – the hardening of the New Orleans grid and how quickly we get power back on for customers.”
In October of last year, the New Orleans City Council opened a grid hardening and resilience docket asking multiple stakeholders to propose infrastructure resiliency and storm hardening plans for Council consideration. This filing is the first step in that direction for Entergy New Orleans.
“While no amount of infrastructure investment can make an electric system completely resistant to the impacts of extreme weather conditions, we know that hardening the system will help us to be better prepared for the new normal of the storms that affect our region. The costs of such projects will impact customers so we look forward to working with the City Council and other stakeholders to identify which projects should be included in the company’s 10-year resiliency investment plan and doing so in an affordable way for our customers,” Rodriguez said.
Entergy New Orleans resilience filing builds upon its previous investments in the grid, such as the 128 MW New Orleans Power Station, the 20 MW New Orleans Solar Station, the commercial and residential rooftop solar program, critical updates to the Derbigny and Avenue C substations, and the underground transformer replacement project in the Central Business District and French Quarter.
Entergy New Orleans, which provides electricity to more than 209,000 customers and natural gas to more than 110,000 customers in Orleans Parish, will work with the city council to determine the best path for New Orleans.
The company is a subsidiary of Entergy, which is investing $15 billion across the company to better protect against weather events. This includes hardening more than 30,000 miles of distribution power lines and nearly 500,000 distribution poles.
“We know that hardening the electric system and investing in newer, more robust structures and equipment will help us to be better prepared for the new normal of the storms that impact our region. This is about serving our customers – whether it is a family, small business, or large industrial manufacturer – with more reliable, more resilient power delivery systems,” Rod West, group utility president for Entergy, said.
