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NEW ORLEANS – Linda Williams is used to power outages in her neighborhood, where high winds often damage the power lines that crisscross her street. But Hurricane Ida was different. A few days after the loss of electricity, the heat made her so dizzy that she had to stay in bed.
“My head started to spin really, really bad,” said Ms. Williams, 71, who even struggled to do the dishes without starting to feel bad.
A few miles from Ms Williams’ home in New Orleans East is a new 128-megawatt gas-fired power plant that she and tens of thousands of other New Orleans residents help fund each month when they pay. their bills to Entergy, the city’s only electricity supplier. utility. The plant went into operation last year with a promise that it would provide fast, reliable starting power to a city that has struggled to weather the increasingly powerful storms blowing from the Gulf of Mexico.
But more than a week after the Category 4 storm toppled transmission lines and cut the city’s connection to the outside power grid, Ms.Williams and many others in New Orleans were still sitting in dark homes and damp, with the last major parts of town put back online only Wednesday. Up to 10 deaths may have been caused by the heat amid the prolonged power outage, the coroner said, after the city’s new power plant failed to hit the ‘black start’ that Entergy had promised – fast delivery of electricity in the middle of a blackout.
“Let’s say you are selling a delivery van and the selling point is that when it runs out of power you can always turn it on to drive it because of a black start function,” said Helena Moreno, President of the City Council. “So one day you are in this situation, your van is no longer powered and even if it starts in the dark, the van does not start,” she said. “Is that what we sold you?” “
Of all American cities, New Orleans is one of the most vulnerable to climate change. In addition to rising sea levels and more powerful storms, the growing threat comes from the number of days with dangerously warm temperatures – which are expected to reach 115 per year in Louisiana by 2050, more than triple the number. current.
The power plant, built in a predominantly black and Vietnamese area of the city already populated with landfills, truck stops and a NASA facility, was sold as a down payment on energy resilience – a guarantee that even though storms cut connections to the rest of the power grid, the city would be able to quickly fire up its own power plant and send electricity to hospitals, nursing homes and at least some of the stuffy neighborhoods as a result of a powerful summer storm.
It was a big bet: a $ 210 million commitment to fossil fuel technology in a city that had already become a national symbol of the dangers of climate change.
From the start, Entergy officials warned that the new plant could only power a small part of the city, even under the best of circumstances. But why it took so long to ramp up and how an entire American city could have gone without power for so long is now the subject of many accusations and blame, with the city pledging to conduct a full investigation that could take time. month.
Entergy officials said the utility faced significant damage to large parts of its transmission and distribution network, making it difficult to fully restore power to the city even after the start of the transmission. new gas plant on September 1, more than two days. after the storm.
“Was it a panacea? No, nothing is, ”said Charles Long, the company’s acting vice president of transmission. “But it definitely made a huge positive difference.”
A group of residents and national environmental groups had argued that it was more urgent than ever for the city to diversify its energy approaches, including investing in bulk battery storage and solar power, strengthening energy infrastructure. transmission and minimizing aggregate demand.
“We, the citizens and taxpayers who were against the factory, were right,” said Dawn Hebert, chair of the New Orleans East Neighborhood Advisory Board. In exchange for accepting another industrial plant in their neighborhood, she said, residents of East New Orleans were promised they would have more reliable power. Instead, when Ida struck, “New Orleans East was not on.”
Entergy has struggled to sell the city on its plans since it first offered the current version of the factory in 2017.
The fact that city council had the sole power to approve the plant was unusual: an internal city watchdog found in 2015 that New Orleans was the only city in the United States responsible for regulating a utility. of investor-owned electricity in a state where there was already a state agency – the Louisiana Civil Service Commission – that could do this.
The arrangement gave New Orleans a large measure of local control, but also allowed Entergy to avoid direct oversight by energy regulatory experts.
Many residents of East New Orleans were against the plant, warning that the location would make it vulnerable to flooding. But city council has also heard positive testimonials, in part because a company hired by Entergy paid actors $ 60 to attend council meetings and pretend to support development, an illegal tactic that led to a fine of $ 5 million.
“They were operating in vendor mode,” said Karl Rábago, who previously served on the Texas Utilities Commission. “They were trying to sell this power plant on the basis of a characteristic, but they were far from explaining the vulnerabilities and limitations of their claims.”
Entergy argued that the plant would serve as a “peak” facility to operate during times of high demand. And with its black-start capability, it would also be able to re-power parts of the city on its own after a power outage, even if New Orleans were cut off from its regular sources of electricity.
But when each of the eight transmission lines that carry electricity to the city suffered heavy damage during Ida, there was no black start. The city remained dark for over 50 hours, and even after small pockets of electricity started to return, it was because one of those transmission lines had been fixed.
Why the black start did not take place is one of the questions to be answered in the next survey. Ms Moreno, the president of the city council, said the council would try to find out “if the previous council was oversold on what this factory could or could not do”.
Environmentalists and other advocates calling for greater reliance on locally produced renewable energy had been skeptical of Entergy’s promises from the start.
Logan Atkinson Burke, executive director of the Alliance for Affordable Energy, a nonprofit utility, prophetically warned at a city council meeting in February 2018 that a storm severe enough to bring down all transmission lines “Would have such a catastrophic impact” on the fragile power lines inside the city that the plant “would be of very little help.”
Entergy has been criticized for years for failing to adequately maintain its distribution network. In 2019, city council fined the company $ 1 million after finding it failed to properly maintain utility poles and wires following a series of power outages between 2014 and 2017. The company reduced its investment in the distribution system by $ 1 million in 2014, which was followed by an increase in the duration and frequency of outages.
Deanna Rodriguez, general manager of Entergy’s operations in New Orleans, said the company had not misled the city about the capabilities of the new gas plant.
“I don’t know what they understood at the time, but I know what we presented at the time, and I think we were specific in our presentation,” Ms. Rodriguez said.
The plant, once started, provided electricity to parts of the city that would otherwise have remained in the dark for much longer, she said.
“There is a lot of misinformation that has led people – not us – to believe that this would somehow feed the whole city,” Ms. Rodriguez said. “The factory worked. It was the right technology at the time it was selected, it performed brilliantly during the storm. “
Entergy officials said the company could have attempted a black start after Ida, but decided not to do so after learning that one of the damaged transmission lines – from Slidell, just northeast of the New Orleans – could be repaired in about the same time it would take to create an “island” grid in the city that could accommodate electricity from the new plant without damaging load imbalance.
They said the black-start capability is more likely to be useful in a circumstance where a storm is passing near New Orleans – cutting off electricity from elsewhere in the city – but not demolishing power lines. distribution within the city as Ida did.
“We could have done it, we were ready to do it,” said Mr. Long, vice president of Entergy. “It just wasn’t the best choice.”
Entergy officials continued to insist that relying on locally produced renewable energy to get a hurricane through the city remains a pipe dream.
While about 38% of the electricity supplied by Entergy to New Orleans comes from non-fossil sources – mostly nuclear – the solar power produced in the city has the capacity to produce, at best, about 5% of demand. peak energy efficiency of the city. , said energy experts.
“If you want to design a system that can withstand a Category 5 hurricane, and every person gets their lights on the next day, with today’s technology, that’s just unaffordable,” Long said.
Some experts say that investing in renewables pays off over time. And Entergy’s argument does not suit many residents, including Ms Williams, who say there is no more time to wait. She and around 200,000 other customers pay higher electricity bills every month to finance the new power plant. Sitting this week in her living room, where it had taken eight days for the power to return, she felt she had not gotten her money’s worth.
“It doesn’t matter whether the factory is there or not,” she said. “We still have problems.
Ivan Penn contributed reports.
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