New Orleans City Council grills Entergy on recent power outages
NEW ORLEANS (WGNO) — New Orleans City Council members spent a majority of their meeting on Tuesday, July 23 firing questions at Entergy on power outages sweeping the city.
“I guess the first question I have is, Entergy has been spending more money in 2023 than it did in 2022 on reliability,” Councilman Joe Giarusso said. “Yet, we’re seeing more outages in 2024. So, what accounts for spending more money but having more outages?”
“When you look at the data, I was actually one of two earlier slides, we’ve had a rash of weather events that have come through this year that has affected our reliability,” said Vice President of Regulatory and Public Affairs Leroy Nix.
Nix repeatedly blamed bad weather, but with over 20% of the outages reported in “fair weather,” council members questioned how the data gets reported.
“When the weather does come through, there are effects that we don’t see on our system that show up once there’s no weather, but also, there’s a field of pieces of equipment that do happen as well like this.”
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Nix also stated the data reported is correct, saying scheduled outages, equipment and vegetation are also to blame. However, Giarrusso says the data doesn’t add up. The councilman claims his email is flooded with complaints from residents across his district and that Entergy has continued to either dodge his questions or leave them unanswered.
“We’ve got to get to not only what the mitigation strategy is, but A, have it implemented and B, have the communication as quickly as possible about not only what went wrong, but when it’s going to be fixed. I’m tired of hearing just be patient. We’re going to work on this. We’re going to do better with our communication. That’s exhausted,” Giarrusso said.
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