Entergy New Orleans upgrades substation in the cityʻs central business district

Entergy New Orleans is upgrading the infrastructure at its Derbigny substation, which serves customers in the Central Business District of New Orleans.

Among these upgrades at this 300 MW substation are new laser installations to deter birds, better fencing to prevent further animal intrusions, and multiple breaker replacements. Further, a new protection clearing scheme that identifies, reacts, and responds more rapidly if there is a fault or failure in the substation will be completed by the end of the year. These new upgrades will help mitigate the risk of outages and shorten power restoration times in the area.

“We continue to take a holistic view of how we plan infrastructure upgrades that will benefit the largest number of customers,” Deanna Rodriguez, president and CEO of Entergy New Orleans, said. “This project is a perfect example of investing in a specific part of the grid with a high economic impact to the entire city.”

In addition, the substation, which contains three transformers for redundancy, is currently undergoing work on sectionalization. This will further isolate faults, protect equipment and minimize outage durations.

Entergy New Orleans has invested approximately $397 million on projects to strengthen its infrastructure since 2016. These investments have helped reduce the frequency of power outages by approximately 30 percent and shortened the length of outages by approximately 28 percent.