A new natural gas power plant, meant to power the city in an emergency, did not come to the rescue when the storm disabled eight transmission lines.
Most of New Orleans went dark on Sunday after Hurricane Ida took out transmission lines and forced power plants offline. It was an all too familiar scene in a city that has often lost power during big storms. But this was an outage that was never supposed to happen. The utility company Entergy opened a new natural gas power plant in the city last year, pledging that it would help keep the lights on — even during hot summer days and big storms. It was one of two natural gas plants commissioned in recent years in the New Orleans area, the other one hailed by Gov. John Bel Edwards last year as a “source of clean energy that gives our state a competitive advantage and helps our communities grow.” The storm raises fresh questions about how well the energy industry has prepared for natural disasters, which many scientists believe are becoming more common because of climate change. This year, much of Texas was shrouded in darkness after a winter storm, and last summer officials in California ordered rolling blackouts during a heat wave. More than a million residential and commercial customers in Louisiana were without power on Monday afternoon, and Entergy and other utilities serving the state said it would take days to assess the damage to their equipment and weeks to fully restore service across the state. One customer can be a family or a large business, so the number of people without power is most likely many times higher. In neighboring Mississippi, just under 100,000 customers were without power. Residents and government officials are now asking why the plant didn’t keep electricity flowing to at least some of the city and how all eight transmission lines bringing power to New Orleans from elsewhere went out of service at the same time — a failure that Entergy blamed on Ida’s “catastrophic intensity.” “If anything happened to the transmission, this gas plant was supposed to supply power to the city of New Orleans,” said Monique Harden, assistant director for public policy at the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, one of the leading organizations fighting the gas plant in the city. “This is going to require some investigation.” Entergy did not immediately respond to requests to discuss the gas plant and its transmission lines. Extreme weather linked to climate change has strained electric grids around the country, compounding the toll of natural disasters by leaving hospitals, governments, people and businesses without electricity for days or weeks. Storms have revealed that energy companies and their regulators have not done enough to harden transmission lines and power plants to withstand extreme temperatures and winds.
