Councilmember Aimee McCarron was spending a summer day outside her parents’ home in Lakeview when she heard a strange noise, followed by a big boom and a shower of sparks.
An Entergy New Orleans transformer had exploded down the street, leaving the block without power — an event that’s all too common in New Orleans, where residents experience frequent power outages on days without rain, storms, or wind.
“We consistently see, year over year, all these regular-day equipment failures,” said McCarron, who represents District A on the New Orleans City Council and is also the chair of the council’s climate change and sustainability committee.
Though New Orleans experienced minimal impacts from Tropical Storm Bertha last week, at least 1,200 Entergy customers lost power Uptown between Freret and Tchoupitoulas streets.
It was unclear whether that was related to the storm or to infrastructure. What is clear is that regular-day outages are usually attributed to the same problem.
“Equipment has been the top thing causing random power outages,” she said.
It’s easy to explain Entergy’s frequent equipment failures by simply taking a drive around New Orleans, where leaning light poles hung with sagging wires and rusting equipment line many streets, said Jesse George, the New Orleans policy director for the energy advocacy nonprofit Alliance for Affordable Energy. No one should boast that the city passed its first hurricane-season test, he said.
“Bertha was not really a test of Entergy’s infrastructure,” George said. “We kind of lucked out.”
City officials are voicing similar concerns, particularly as climate change causes more severe storms with higher winds. On Wednesday, the council’s utility committee passed a scathing Reliability Standards resolution that requires Entergy New Orleans to share more details about its reliability, its spending and the steps that the company has taken to improve.
The resolution notes that Entergy’s current decline seemed to begin in 2024, “with spiking increases in unplanned, fair-weather outages, most frequently resulting from equipment failures or vegetation-related failures.”
One in three outages caused by failed equipment
More than one-third of the 716 power outages that Entergy reported in New Orleans during the first three months of this year were caused by equipment failures, Entergy data show.
Other reasons for reported outages include trees or animals touching power lines, and public damage, such as a truck hitting a pole. These totals do not include hurricanes and severe weather, known as “Major Event Days,” which are exempt from Entergy’s reporting requirements, though an amendment by Councilperson Matt Willard to Wednesday’s resolution would require Entergy to report on those days as well.
From April to July, more than 17,000 Entergy households experienced outages for a total of more than 12,000 hours without power, according to Entergy data presented to City Council on Wednesday, McCarron told The Lens.
Those households risk losing refrigerated food and prescription medicines, or — within the recent heat wave — family members suffering heat stroke.
“Whether it’s 20 people or 1,000 people,” McCarron said, “it is impactful when you have power out every single day. It’s not necessarily just about how we’re preparing for a storm — we aren’t prepared well enough for every day.”
All seven City Councilmembers authored the resolution, which will be voted on by the full council on Aug. 6.
Beau Tidwell, a spokesperson for Entergy New Orleans, said the company “looks forward to working with the council and their staff on next steps” of the resolution.
Entergy New Orleans is working to improve its infrastructure, Tidwell said, and has currently began a grid-strengthening plan, the Accelerated Resilience Plan. The first phase of the plan includes 63 projects throughout the city, he said. “We are strengthening or replacing 3,100 structures — mainly distribution poles, which are being upgraded to withstand winds up to 140 mph,” Tidwell wrote in a statement.
Entergy is updating its progress in the Accelerated Resilience Plan on a dedicated website that includes maps of projects in each district.
Shoddy poles inspire a candidacy
Chris Justin, a 39-year-old chemical engineer, has for years seen the leaning poles and busted transformers that line many New Orleans streets. He even started a website, Service My Pole, for Louisiana residents to share photos of equipment from their neighborhoods that need maintenance or replacing. The site features dozens of pictures of shoddy electrical equipment from around the state.
“So many people have told me that now, they drive around and see these poles that they’ve just accepted for years. They see how bad it actually is,” Justin said.
So far, there have been 165 poles “shamed,” according to the site. Only one has been marked as “fixed.”
Justin became so frustrated by the state of electricity infrastructure and utility regulation in Louisiana that he decided to run for Louisiana Public Service Commission. A New Orleans resident, Justin is running to represent District 1 on the commission, a seat held since 2009 by Eric Skrmetta, who will reach his term limit at the end of December.
The Public Service Commission audited the state’s electricity services last year. Its report labels aging equipment, climate change and extreme weather as some of the biggest challenges facing the grid.
Utilities collect money built into customers’ rates to pay for all capital investments, but they get to keep any money that they did not spend. But a rising portion of every bill also goes to investors, as illustrated by a report published in March by the Energy & Policy Institute, which found that, for a customer paying a $200 monthly electric bill, roughly $30 went to corporate profits.
The electric-utilities system, as currently configured, favors building as little as possible, to the point where existing equipment isn’t maintained, Justin said. That systemic lack of maintenance explains the unreliable grid and clear-day outages — not to mention the grid failures during severe weather and hurricanes, he added.
“There’s no actual standards out there with teeth that the utility companies have to abide by, and because of that, they don’t take care of our stuff,” Justin said.
In other states, Justin said, utilities have regular inspection cycles. In Florida, for instance, inspections are required every eight years. He’d like to see Louisiana’s Public Service Commission follow suit by implementing regular, mandatory inspections; providing more scrutiny of utility maintenance plans and possibly instituting fines for utilities that fail to meet commission standards, he said.
The commission is currently assessing Entergy’s infrastructure in an attempt to boost the city’s hurricane preparedness, said Davante Lewis, a Louisiana Public Service Commissioner whose district includes New Orleans. While the commission does not regulate Entergy New Orleans — that responsibility falls on City Council — it does require all utilities to create a five-year plan for improving the resiliency of their systems, Lewis said.
More resilient systems are necessary to withstand storms and hurricanes exacerbated by climate change — some storms might bring wind speeds so strong that scientists have proposed a new category.
“We are now talking about potential category 6s, which would have a higher windspeed that some of our older poles were not built to sustain,” Lewis said. “We don’t want to test that when a storm happens.”
“It is impactful when you have power out every single day.
Aimee McCarron, New Orleans City Councilmember
It’s not necessarily just about how we’re preparing for a storm
— we aren’t prepared well enough for every day.”
Community organizing for more reliable electricity
The Alliance for Affordable Energy is working with Together New Orleans, another community nonprofit, to install connected battery storage systems on homes and businesses that create a virtual “neighborhood power plant” with stored energy that can be shared at times of high demand.
The network, called the Neighborhood Power Plan, would help ease pressure on the grid during periods of high electricity usage, and provide electricity during outages.
The Neighborhood Power Plan has received funding from City Council and should be operable next year, but both groups said that they’d hoped the system would be up and running before then.
The City Council allocated $28 million in funding in December for the Neighborhood Power Plan. Since then, advocates have been caught up in disputes with Entergy over how the money should be used. Organizers like Nathalie Jordi, who works on energy policy initiatives for Together New Orleans, believe that the money should go exclusively towards installation of the batteries. Entergy argues it should cover other ongoing costs as well.
Entergy’s formula would significantly reduce the number of batteries that would be installed, Jordi said. The debates about allocation of funds have delayed the start of battery installations.
“We could all have these batteries, because they’re really fast to install, but we don’t,” she said.
Ultimately, the batteries will provide a necessary combination of resilience and reliability that can bridge gaps in Entergy’s service, Jordi said.
“Reliability is, ‘Can you keep the stuff on in a consistent way when everything’s normal?’ and the answer in Entergy’s case is ‘No,’” Jordi said. “Resilience is, ‘Can you keep the stuff on when we have extreme weather, given that we’ve paid you billions of dollars to do that?’ The answer to that is also ‘No.’”
