Join the Alliance for Affordable Energy for a virtual community Town Hall on June 2 at 6pm to talk about what really happened during the Sunday outage that left over 100,000 Louisianans in the dark.
If you were impacted come share your experience. If you have questions, we’ll do our best to answer them. We want to hear from you, let’s work together towards solutions.
A special hearing will take place the following day, Tuesday June 3 at 10 AM in New Orleans City Council Chambers. It is our regulators’ duty to require that all involved parties provide answers, transparency, and that utilities develop measures so that citizens don’t find themselves in the dark, again. Our regulators, Councilmembers and Louisiana Public Service Commissioner, must call for answers and solutions from Entergy and MISO.
Head to our blog, 9 Major Questions About the May 25 Load Shedding Event, for the full breakdown on what we know so far. The short version: Power demand exceeded supply and to avoid a much larger blackout, the regional grid operator, MISO, ordered Entergy and Cleco to initiate a controlled power outage.
Why did this happen? What we know so far is that an Entergy-operated nuclear power plant, Riverbend, unexpectedly went offline on May 21, meaning it was not providing power to the grid; this happened while another Entergy nuclear plant was offline Sunday for scheduled routine maintenance. There were also transmission constraints, and possibly outages that also added to the situation. Additionally, the weather was likely hotter than models predicted, which resulted in more power demand than was expected, and power couldn’t move to where people needed it.
However, this remains only a piece of the puzzle, as the load shed wasn’t called until May 25. Other factors that forced a 600 MW reduction in demand were at play, and determining those factors will require transparency and accountability from the utilities who own and operate power plants and transmission assets.
