In December, Entergy New Orleans submitted its plan for Energy Smart to the NOLA City Council. The plan laid out two scenarios:
And the Council chose Scenario 2.
Three years ago Entergy argued the targets were impossible, but here we are in 2020 and not only are they able to fulfill the targets they are able to go even farther to reduce energy waste.
It’s all in the planning. Resource planning that is. Every three years Entergy does an Integrated Resource Planning (IRP) process to consider what their resources should look like over the next two decades. The process includes the Council’s advisors, staff, and other stakeholders. Typically utilities include in these plans their own report on how much efficiency is possible.
In this year’s cycle, however, the Council decided to hire a consultant who was independent from Entergy to find out how much energy waste we could eliminate, and to include that information in the IRP. This report showed that New Orleans could save millions of dollars and kilowatt hours and could exceed the existing targets.
The Council chose the more robust scenario at their February 13th Utility Committee meeting. We supported Scenario 2, to ramp up the benefits from even more efficiency across the city.
