Longstanding deficiencies in the region’s transmission system caused a forced blackout that left more than 100,000 southeast Louisiana households and businesses without lights or air conditioning during a sweltering Memorial Day weekend, officials told members of the New Orleans City Council during a Tuesday (June 3) council committee meeting.
According to representatives from Entergy New Orleans and regional electrical grid operator Midcontent Independent System Operator (MISO) — which controls the grid in 15 states, including Louisiana, and part of Canada — the blackout was not due to a lack of energy supply in the grid, even during a high-demand weekend where temperatures reached into the 90s. There was more than enough power. The area simply lacked adequate transmission lines to deliver it.
As for the abruptness of the shutoffs, which came without any advance notice to the public, the grid operators said they had only 30 minutes’ warning before the blackouts needed to begin.
Todd Hillman, a senior vice president and chief customer officer for MISO, told the council that in transmission system emergencies, there is little time for notification or mitigation before taking action.
“If you get these types of system conditions on the transmission system, you are required, within that 30-minute time frame, to shed load in those areas,” Hillman said. “We only have to look at recent events in Spain and Portugal, as well as the East Coast blackout of 200, to find similar transmission-related events that, if not managed, can lead to those cascading and very impactful outages.”
The incident raised questions over the vulnerability of both the regional and local power systems, especially as Louisianans contend with increasing risks to the grid from more frequent and intense storms and higher temperatures, as well as rapidly growing demand for power as data centers powering artificial intelligence come online – and further stress existing systems.
Councilmembers and residents who attended the meeting demanded to know why Entergy and MISO have not done more to improve transmission, as well as power generation, in the city.
While there is some local generation — notably the controversial gas power plant Entergy has operated in New Orleans East since 2020 — it only prevented a shutoff for a small fraction of the region.
“The model where we generate our electricity hundreds of miles away and then convey it on wires atop wooden or steel poles or concrete poles, is inherently vulnerable,” Broderick Bagert, an organizer with Together New Orleans, said. “We need to invest in transmission, but we also need to generate it.”
Then there was the communication problem. Though Entergy officials knew prior to the May 25 transmission emergency that the grid was strained, they did not issue a warning that a blackout was possible.
Representatives from Entergy and MISO said they would work on improving their communication – both with each other and with customers – so that future rolling blackouts won’t come as large a surprise as last month’s.
“God forbid if this ever happens again, we will be doing exactly what you suggested, which is, even if we don’t think it’s going to happen, giving fair warning well ahead of time that we are in one of these transmission system emergencies – and what courses of action might be taken,” Hillman said.
The May 25 load shed
On May 25, Entergy and Cleco — the power utility for parts of the northshore — were directed to shut down approximately 600 megawatts of power as part of a load shedding event, sometimes called a rolling blackout. In New Orleans, the outage primarily affected homes and businesses in the Lakeview, Gentilly, and Treme neighborhoods, which saw 50,000 Entergy New Orleans customers cut off.
Load shedding occurs when there is some combination of supply shortage and increased demand for power that, without intervention, could potentially lead to cascading outages. In order to prevent widespread and prolonged outages, power companies temporarily cut power to certain areas in order to reduce demand on the grid.
According to representatives from MISO, three factors were responsible for the Memorial Day weekend load shed. First, Louisiana is a “load pocket,” meaning it has high demand and limited transmission lines delivering electricity. Second, there were several generation and transmission outages throughout the entire regional system – some planned for maintenance, others unplanned and caused by weather events – which put more stress on the operating system. And finally, third, temperatures were warmer than usual, increasing demand for electricity.
“It wasn’t one thing that caused this,” Hillman said. “This is really a culmination of events that led us to the decision we had to make to maintain reliability.”
One of the central questions at the meeting was: When did MISO, and then Entergy, become aware that a load shed, or forced outage, may become necessary?
According to Hillman, though MISO was aware of “challenging conditions,” the operator had an alternative reconfiguration plan to help mitigate them throughout Memorial Day weekend, a plan that wouldn’t require rolling blackouts. However, at 4 p.m. on May 25, MISO employees received an alert of a transmission system emergency, which suggested that the transmission lines into southern Louisiana couldn’t provide all the power that was needed. Like traffic on a highway, there was congestion preventing the flow of power.
When an alert like this happens, the North American Reliability Corporation, which mandates reliability standards for power systems, requires regional transmission organizations like MISO to take “corrective action” to address the emergency within 30 minutes. So, MISO quickly alerted Entergy that the system was becoming stressed – a fact that Entergy officials confirmed.
About 20 minutes later, Entergy Louisiana and Entergy New Orleans were then asked to shed approximately 500 megawatts across the Slidell and New Orleans areas until further notice. Cleco, which also provides power in Louisiana, was told to shed 100 megawatts of power.
Because this was a concern over transmission, and not necessarily capacity, there was less time for the utilities to notify customers about the stress on the system before they were required to initiate the load shed, according to MISO representatives.
Still, the lack of transparency and notice ruffled councilmembers’ feathers.
At one point, Councilmember Eugene Green pulled up the Entergy outage map from Memorial Day weekend and pointed to the neighborhoods shaded in red, many in his own district — which covers Gentilly — representing where the outage occurred.
“Red represents traffic lights that are out, refrigerators that are out, medicine that should be refrigerated that’s not being refrigerated,” Green said. “It’s hard for me to understand how, with technology in this day and age, a firm such as yourself doesn’t allow more notice of potential events such as this.”
MISO representatives said that although the load shed was necessary to prevent a widespread outage, they wished that the potential of such an event had been communicated earlier to both utility companies and customers.
“While from a reliability perspective, the ‘what’ we did was absolutely correct, the ‘how’ we did it can always get much, much better,” Hillman said.
He also stressed that the rolling blackout wasn’t about lack of energy generation but specifically about the transmission system and operating limits that cannot be violated.
“We didn’t do a good enough job training you all and others about what an [interconnection reliability operating limit] is and how that’s different from all these capacity energy emergencies you might have heard of in the past,” Hillman said, noting that capacity energy emergencies typically have longer lead times, allowing utility companies to ask customers to reduce their energy consumption in order to minimize stress on the grid.
‘Let this be a wake-up call’
But councilmembers, residents and advocates for energy affordability and sustainability all raised questions as to why Entergy and MISO, both of which are aware of the fact that New Orleans is a transmission island, have not taken more steps to increase the number of transmission lines in the region.
“The bigger issue here is that we have not had the transmission development we’ve needed here,” Council Vice President Helena Moreno said, noting that this had been a key concern for the council following Hurricane Ida, when all eight transmission lines into the city went down, causing a days-long, city-wide power outage.
In recent years, 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 has occurred in MISO’s Midwestern states. Moreno asked Hillman why MISO has yet to undertake comprehensive transmission improvements in the South.
“While [Southern power companies] may not be doing it in that same grandiose way as the North and Central companies, there’s actually a lot of transmission planning happening in this region, along with generation planning,” Hillman said, noting that Phase 3, which would upgrade transmission in southeastern Louisiana, was currently in the works.
Currently, there’s a bottleneck within MISO as the system crosses Arkansas and Missouri. This bottleneck causes congestion between the two regions and constrains New Orleanians’ access to some of the more renewable and cheaper energy generation happening in MISO North. Phase 4, which has not yet been approved, will improve transmission through that bottleneck, improving the region’s overall access to energy.
Beyond critiques of MISO, some local residents and energy advocates also raised questions over why Entergy New Orleans has not taken more steps to improve transmission into and energy generation within New Orleans, especially as the city faces increasing risks of outages due to climate change.
Representatives from Entergy New Orleans claimed that the New Orleans Power Station — the New Orleans East plant that went online in 2020 — helped a bit, but not nearly enough to forestall the outages. The plant saved approximately 25,000 customers from having their power cut during Memorial Day weekend, according to Charles Long, the senior vice president of power delivery at Entergy.
Logan Burke, the executive director of the Alliance for Affordable Energy, said Memorial Day weekend should serve as a warning to utilities and residents alike.
“If power can’t get to us, two things are going to happen: We’re going to pay more money and we’re going to be more vulnerable to outages,” Burke said. “And unfortunately, we’ve been paying more than necessary for years, and we had a heck of an outage last week. So I have a very simple ask today to each of you as regulators, and to each of you who live here in Louisiana, let this be a wake-up call.”
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