Talk to most New Orleanians – or Louisianians – about their experience of hurricanes and you’ll likely be regaled with stories of long-lasting power outages: of hours and days spent sweating profusely without air conditioning, chasing down someone with a battery to charge a phone or sitting in long lines to get gasoline to fuel a generator.
The geography of New Orleans — a near-island that sits at low elevation in the middle of Hurricane Alley — along with its aging, unevenly-maintained electrical grid, makes the city especially vulnerable to outages. The severity of such outages can vary, but even relatively minor ones can be uncomfortable and costly. Many residents and local businesses end up throwing out hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars of spoiled food from lukewarm fridges and freezers. Some clinics have to dispose of temperature-sensitive medicine and vaccines.
Worse yet, prolonged power outages can lead to death. In 2021, Hurricane Ida, which hit the region as a powerful Category 4 storm, left nearly the entire city without power in the sweltering late summer heat for days. The Orleans Parish Coroner’s Office later attributed 21 deaths to Ida, but not one was killed in rushing floodwaters or from falling debris.
Rather, according to the coroner’s report, all died several days after landfall — 19 from heat exhaustion and two from carbon monoxide poisoning while trying to operate a generator in an enclosed space.
Once again this year, hurricane forecasters have predicted an unusually busy season. It’s still relatively early — the peak of the season is more than a month out —, but there have already been signs of tropical activity in the region. This week, the National Hurricane Center is tracking a low-pressure system making its way across Florida and toward the Gulf of Mexico. As of Monday (July 14), it had a 30% chance of developing into a tropical cyclone within seven days.
As the season ramps up, how likely is it that a power outage will occur in New Orleans? And is there anything that the city and the electric utility could be doing to decrease that likelihood – or, at least, mitigate its impact on local residents?
What causes a power outage? And how likely is it to occur?
According to Together New Orleans, which used data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, there is a 1 in 9 chance of there being a long-duration power outage each year. A power outage is typically caused by one of two different phenomena. The first, and probably most well-known, is damage to transmission and distribution lines. The second cause of an outage is when power demand exceeds a utility’s ability to generate or transmit it.
Transmission lines are like highways, moving power across vast distances, while distribution lines are like neighborhood streets, directly connecting homes, businesses and community centers to the grid. Nationwide, damage to distribution lines is the most frequent cause of power outages.
“And oftentimes, these outages will occur because a tree will fall on the line, or a pole will break, or a squirrel will get into a transformer, or a snake will go somewhere, and it’ll pop and it’ll cause problems,” said Simon Mahan, executive director of the Southern Renewable Energy Association. In recent years, things as seemingly inconsequential as Mylar balloons have caused damage to the distribution system, at times leaving thousands without power.
Because distribution systems connect individual buildings to the grid, outages as a result of damage to distribution lines and substations are localized. This is why one neighborhood block might have power while another one might be without. Following hurricanes and other major weather events, Entergy — the power provider for New Orleans and much of the rest of Louisiana — typically deploys a fleet of line workers to go and repair damage to the distribution system, bringing neighborhoods back onto the grid one line or substation at a time.
“Entergy New Orleans prepares for storm response year-round, and our crews stand ready once again this year to restore service as quickly and safely as possible in the event of an outage,” Beau Tidwell, spokesperson for Entergy New Orleans, told Verite News, when asked about what the company is doing to prepare for outages.
Occasionally, there are outages caused by damage to transmission lines, which, because they are delivering more electricity over longer distances, means that the impacts can be far more widespread. In 2008, Hurricane Gustav severely damaged transmission into New Orleans, leading state and local regulators to criticize Entergy for poor grid maintenance. Then, again, in 2021, Hurricane Ida knocked out all eight transmission lines into New Orleans – cloaking the entire city in darkness and leaving most residents without power for more than 10 days. (Reporting at the time showed that Entergy had neglected to fund grid resiliency efforts that could’ve prevented the outage to over 1 million customers in Louisiana.)
“We’re a load island on the wrong side of transmission constraints,” said Broderick Bagert, a community organizer with Together New Orleans. “The problem is distance. That we have to move our power from hundreds of miles away to where it needs to be on wooden poles conveying wires is an inherent source of vulnerability. … Distance equals vulnerability.”
One of the reasons that New Orleans is vulnerable to widespread power outages is that it is a transmission island, also known as a load pocket, meaning that the city has to import almost all of the energy it uses. This is largely due to the fact of geography. New Orleans is small in area and surrounded by water on nearly all sides, limiting both the city’s ability to generate its own power within the city limits as well as the number of transmission lines that can bring power in.
But transmission is not only a concern for New Orleans. Entergy belongs to the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, a regional transmission organization that stretches all the way from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. As a regional transmission organization, MISO manages the transmission and market of electricity across parts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas, up through Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota, and into Canada.
Within MISO, there is one major bottleneck. Power can only flow from the North and Central regions of MISO through one 500 kilovolt transmission line that runs through Arkansas. This bottleneck limits the amount of power that utilities in the South can access from the North. But even beyond that bottleneck, there are also transmission issues within the Southern region, which impact the movement of power into and across the region.
“In an emergency, especially a winter storm, that ability to swap power back and forth gets constrained,” Mahan said. “Everyone’s using the same transmission system at the same time, so MISO is not able to effectively move the power back and forth.”
This leads to the second major cause of power outages: An outage can happen when the demand for power exceeds the utility’s ability to generate or transmit that power. When this happens, utilities are forced to offline some portion of electric customers in what is called a “load shed,” in order to prevent the system from a cascading series of malfunctions, which could lead to even more widespread outages, like the Northeast blackout of 2003.
“Electricity is generated instantaneously, consumed instantaneously, and travels at the speed of light, so, if you don’t have a balance of generation and the power demands that are almost identical, you can cause some real havoc in the system,” Mahan said.
Over Memorial Day weekend, a load shed initiated by MISO left more than 50,000 customers in New Orleans without power for hours. In that case, it wasn’t lack of power generation that caused the blackout. It was the fact that the transmission system didn’t have the capacity to carry all the energy needed into the region. Like traffic on a highway, there was congestion slowing the flow of power into New Orleans and southeastern Louisiana.
But load sheds can also be caused by insufficient power generation, which, as energy demands surge due to increasing temperatures from climate change, increasing electrification of homes and transport, and the growth of energy-intensive data centers, may become more likely. That increasing demand poses a risk to the grid, which requires stability to operate well.
“The power needs of the country are skyrocketing unlike any other time in our lifetime,” Bagert said. “This is totally different from anything that anybody has experienced since World War II or the post-war period. And transmission’s ability to keep up with it is going to mean those kinds of outages are much more likely.”
Another key factor in outages is weather – which impacts everything from power generation to transmission and distribution.
“The entire electric system is weather-dependent,” Mahan said.
There are the obvious weather threats to the system. High winds during a tropical storm or a hurricane can take out transmission and distribution lines, as can floods or ice. But weather also impacts the grid in other ways. Weather determines whether people might be using more electricity to power heat or cooling. And all power generation sources are sensitive to weather.
Most people are aware that solar and wind energy are weather-dependent, but so is natural gas and nuclear energy, which both require significant cooling systems to operate well. Weather impacts the grid from almost every angle: increasing demand, hobbling transmission and distribution, and threatening power generation.
How should the city prevent outages or, at least, limit their impact when they do happen?
So, what can Entergy New Orleans and the city of New Orleans do to decrease the likelihood of outages and, when they do occur, ensure that their negative impacts are mitigated?
“There’s no silver bullet; it’s more a silver buckshot,” Mahan said.
When it comes to limiting damage to distribution lines and substations, Mahan pointed to grid hardening measures – like replacing wooden poles with metal poles – that have been successfully implemented in Florida, another hurricane-vulnerable state.
“There are some distribution lines that are more susceptible than others to failure,” Mahan said. “Either the poles are 60 years old and they need to get replaced, or they are in an open area where the straight line winds can come and knock things down or where it’s easier for ice to accumulate on them during wintertime or they get flooded out. And so there may be a way that the city or Entergy can go through and find common points of failure for these distribution lines and figure out, is there some better way to do this?”
For its part, following the disastrous outage related to Hurricane Ida, Entergy New Orleans looked to Florida Power and Light as a model in drafting its “Operation Gridiron,” a plan that would invest in grid-hardening, transmission and undergrounding more wires.
Ultimately, the council balked at the $1 billion price tag, which would’ve increased customers’ bills by as much as $12 per month, and instead approved a modified plan paired with reliability standards and a much cheaper price tag. That plan still included large investments in infrastructure, with Entergy upgrading transmission into the city, improving local distribution and funding a backup battery storage system for the grid.
Phase 1 of that plan, which includes more than 60 projects across the city and comes at no cost to ratepayers, is currently in progress.
“We have also partnered with the Council on our Resilience plan to harden the grid across the City,” Tidwell said. “That means upgrading and replacing poles and infrastructure to withstand storms that are coming at us stronger and faster each year.”
When it comes to transmission, Mahan said the answer is simple: “Clearly, more is better.”
According to Tidwell, Entergy New Orleans is also actively working on increasing and improving transmission into the city: “Entergy is investing over $100M to upgrade the main transmission line that comes into the City, and we worked with the City Council to secure $55M from the federal government to help fund those upgrades.”
On the regional level, MISO has undertaken a long-range transmission plan, investing large tranches of funding into improving both local and regional transmission lines across its system, but the majority of that work so far has occurred in MISO’s Midwestern states. Phase 3 and Phase 4, which have not yet been approved, will improve transmission within the Southern region and across the bottleneck in Arkansas.
When it comes to managing energy demand – in order to prevent another load shed like on Memorial Day weekend – Mahan said that energy efficiency can play a key role.
“There are a lot of very old buildings in New Orleans that aren’t energy efficient, that are using tons and tons of energy that create more strain on the grid,” Mahan said, adding that the cumulative effects of energy efficiency would dramatically reduce demands on the grid.
The New Orleans City Council recently passed an energy benchmarking ordinance that would require large buildings to track and publish their power consumption as part of a larger effort to promote better energy efficiency.
But the city would also be less vulnerable to a possible load shed if it generated more of its own energy within city limits. It’s not possible to put another natural gas plant or nuclear power plant or large-scale wind farm within the city, but it is possible to put in solar panels to generate electricity and batteries to store it. It’s this latter tactic that Bagert believes will pave the way to a more resilient future when it comes to the New Orleans grid.
Last year, Together New Orleans launched Community Lighthouse, an effort to outfit religious and community centers with solar panels and batteries so that they can continue to have power in the midst of blackouts. Already, the community group has constructed more than a dozen “lighthouses.”
“I think, conceptually, things get much clearer if resilience means one thing and reliability means something else,” Bagert said. “Reliability is about how frequently the system goes down. … And resilience is about how well the system can operate after it goes down.”
For Bagert, projects like Community Lighthouse can promote better resiliency when outages do happen. He hopes that there will be larger-scale investments across the board into “virtual power plant” models where solar panels and batteries storing energy are distributed across the city and connected to the grid.
Tidwell, the Entergy spokesman, expressed some caution towards investment in renewable energy.
“We continually review our generation power sources, and strive to balance innovation with affordability for our customers,” Tidwell said. “Recent federal legislation concerning wind and solar energy projects significantly impacts the conversation around affordability [of renewable energy generation]. Proposals related to those technologies will need to be carefully re-evaluated, particularly as it relates to cost impact on the customers we serve.”
But advocates for renewable energy – and its potential to help prevent or mitigate power outages – said it is important to think about cost in a more holistic way.
“If we have a cheap grid, but it’s unreliable, we are paying for it in some other fashion, by businesses being closed and by schools being closed,” Mahan said. “Public safety can be at risk when the power is out because stoplights stop functioning. And we know people die when the power is out for too long.”