Called to the podium by the New Orleans City Council, MISO and Entergy leadership agreed that a perfect storm of factors merged to cause the Memorial Day weekend power outages in the metro area.

The council convened a special Utility Committee on June 3 to grill MISO and Entergy leadership. MISO delivered 600 MW in load-shed orders May 25 in a last-ditch effort to maintain the system before something more catastrophic could befall the grid. The RTO ordered 500 MW offline in the Entergy territory and 100 MW offline in the Cleco territory. (See MISO: New Orleans Area Outages Owed to Scant Gen, Congestion, Heat.)

Senior Vice President and Chief Customer Officer Todd Hillman said with a “short amount of customer impact,” MISO was able to avert a “larger, more far-reaching” outage event.

Hillman said it’s “frustrating” that MISO cannot single out a source of the outages. Rather, he said it was a “culmination of factors.”

“It wasn’t one thing that happened. It wasn’t one thing you can point to and say, ‘oh OK, it was that transmission line’ or ‘oh OK, it was that unit,’” Hillman said. He said while MISO’s earlier modeling showed Louisiana would come through May 25 without issue, in the literal heat of the day, conditions changed.

In all, about 4.5 GW of generation was out in the area at the time, including Entergy’s Waterford and River Bend nuclear stations, the latter of which unexpectedly flickered off days before due to a cooling leak. The limited generation availability coincided with offline and overloaded transmission facilities. At the time, Entergy’s 500-kV transmission path near Jennings, La., remained out of service from a March tornado.

“We had a number of units that were [on] unplanned outages during that week. The good news is most of those are back on. So, they were working through that to get back on. In fact, that major transmission line to the west was back on two days after the event. So, they’re working feverishly to get ready for the peak season; it was just that all of these things sort of came together for that one, single moment,” Hillman said of MISO South utilities following the event.

Hillman assured the council that MISO works with its members to expand transmission and generation plans to make sure MISO South is reliable. He said MISO studied and approved the planned generation outages months before the event.

But he also said south Louisiana lacks import ability and can be affected when local generation is sparse.

Executive Director of Market Operations JT Smith said MISO is delving into why it experienced so many outages that week. He said the biggest change from days leading up to the outage to May 25 was an uptick in load due to hotter temperatures.

‘Plane Crash’

Council member Oliver Thomas questioned MISO’s deftness that day as the “air traffic controller” of the power grid. MISO leadership often makes the analogy.

“The plane didn’t land. It crashed,” Thomas said.

“We prevented a crash by making sure that plane never took off,” Hillman responded.

Thomas asked how many customers lost power that day. Hillman and Smith confirmed it was about 100,000.

“Tell them it was a landing,” Thomas retorted.

Hillman said he wasn’t trying to suggest there wasn’t a problem but stressed that MISO managed to avoid rampant, unchecked blackouts.

Council member Jean-Paul “JP” Morrell said a more suitable analogy might be likening the blackouts to the city’s periodic flooding when its pumping system is overwhelmed and decisions are made to release water in one neighborhood to save the larger city.

“Though the rest of the city celebrates not being flooded, the one neighborhood that is flooded is rightfully pretty upset about it and pretty pissed,” Morrell said.

MISO identified the risk of an interconnection reliability operating limit (IROL) violation at 4 p.m. CT on a transmission constraint on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. After 20 minutes where it conducted an analysis of available options, MISO called upon Entergy to commence load shed in the New Orleans and Slidell areas. MISO directed Cleco to shed load about 10 minutes after it delivered instructions to Entergy.

“We want to make sure double, triply, quadruply sure that’s the only course of action that we have at that point,” Hillman said of the 20 minutes of review time.

MISO, Entergy Vow to Improve Notification Time

Council member Eugene Green said residents needed more time to prepare and questioned why an alert was not sent out through NOLA Ready, the city’s emergency preparedness texting system.

Hillman said MISO is considering introducing more notifications to give the public “fair warning” about its risk posture.

Hillman and Smith emphasized throughout the hearing that NERC allots grid operators 30 minutes to get load off the system to prevent larger blackouts once it’s clear that an IROL issue is a possibility.

“We should have been communicating much greater externally that we were on that precipice,” Smith said. He added that even though MISO was “on the cutting edge” from Thursday onward managing congestion, MISO believed it would navigate the event without resorting to drastic measures.

Smith said prior to the event, MISO and Entergy had compared notes and had a mitigation plan at the ready. However, he said in the moment, for reasons that MISO has yet to understand, the agreed-upon transmission reconfiguration solution wasn’t viable.

“So yes, it would have surprised everyone participating in it,” Smith said.

Hillman said MISO hoped to avoid an IROL situation by talking through mitigation plans ahead of time.

“Those solved until they didn’t solve when we got to the real-time conditions,” Hillman said. Hillman said MISO conducted a “tremendous” amount of analysis on system conditions over the weekend leading into Sunday.

MISO ultimately was able to use the reconfiguration plan a few hours after it instructed the utilities to shed load as it restored power.

Though Entergy maintained a day after the outages that it had not seen a reason to shed load, company officials who appeared at the meeting said it was necessary.

Entergy New Orleans CEO Deanna Rodriguez said MISO’s load-shed orders served to avoid a “potentially catastrophic outage such as occurred recently in Portugal and Spain.” She said the circumstances were beyond Entergy’s “immediate control” and apologized to council members.

“We are working closely with MISO to better understand this highly unusual event and what can be done to prevent this from ever happening again,” she told council members. She said Entergy New Orleans would take pains to be “more aligned with MISO” in order to give ratepayers more notice.

Fielding questioning over the comprehensiveness of Entergy’s risk modeling, Rodriguez said while Entergy and MISO plan workarounds for maintenance outages, unplanned outages, hot weather and transmission outages, those variables never have all lined up at the same time. She also said Entergy didn’t know its reconfiguration plan would not have worked until MISO informed the utility in real time. Rodriguez said that failure will inform Entergy’s training and planning going forward.

Hillman said it’s not surprising MISO’s wider view of system vulnerabilities contradicted Entergy’s risk estimations up to the load shed.

Smith said load shedding to avoid potential collapse from IROL violations is an extremely rare event in MISO. He said a load-shed event during Winter Storm Uri in 2021 and an incident around 2014 in Baton Rouge when generation and transmission went down suddenly were the only other instances he could think of in his 20 years at MISO.

Entergy Senior Vice President Power Delivery Charles Long said Entergy, like MISO, believed it wouldn’t find itself in a load-shed situation over the holiday weekend.

Long said no significant transmission or generation outages occurred on May 25, with the unplanned generation outages all starting before the weekend.

“We knew that Memorial Day weekend was going to be a challenge. We knew that it was tight,” Long said.

Long said Entergy now understands the reconfiguration plan MISO and Entergy worked out would have failed, per MISO’s broader modeling. He said while catastrophic outages tend to develop slowly, “this one was rare and evolved very quickly.”

Council members repeatedly asked who decided which neighborhoods should go without electricity.

Long said Entergy operators choose to interrupt substations based on maximum relief on constrained transmission, without worsening system conditions, with fewest customers impacted. He said there was no time to be “surgical” and shed load according to its usual prioritization of critical loads. Long said Entergy didn’t have time to single out its interruptible industrial customers and instead cast off load closest to the problem area.

Morrell said he learned of the load shedding only when the power was cut. He said he didn’t know “what the hell was going on,” undermining his ability to regulate Entergy. He said from his perspective, Entergy could have notified regulators sooner of the grid stress and could have made public appeals ahead of the weekend for customers to lower usage.

“There’s always going to be that jerk that keeps his AC on 60,” Morrell added.

Entergy officials confirmed the New Orleans Power Station, a controversial, 128-MW gas generator built in 2020 and touted for its black start capability, was running at the time and helped to avoid further outages of about 25,000 customers. (See Entergy Touts Restoration; NOLA Leaders Question Lack of Blackstart Service.)

Council member Helena Moreno said it might be time for Entergy to weigh adding a battery storage facility to the New Orleans Power Station.

Attention Turns to MISO South Tx Planning

“Let’s talk about the bigger issue. The bigger issue here is we have not had the level of transmission development in our area that we should have,” Moreno said, adding that she remembered writing a letter urging MISO South transmission planning in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida in 2021.

Louisiana Public Service Commissioner Davante Lewis, who was a guest at the invitation of the city, said southeastern Louisiana not being able to access otherwise plentiful electricity to the north is evidence the region needs transmission planning.

Moreno asked MISO when it would focus its long-range transmission planning on MISO South. MISO long-term planning so far has focused solely on MISO Midwest; the RTO has planned to draft a third portfolio for the Midwest region before it focuses on the South.

Hillman said between 2017 and 2023, MISO South utilities independently planned about $13 billion in local transmission projects that MISO has approved.

“While they may not be doing it in that same, grandiose way as the North and Central [regions], there’s actually a lot of transmission planning happening in this region along with generation planning,” he said.

But Hillman acknowledged MISO South was “owed” a long-range transmission plan. He said MISO could begin a MISO South long-range transmission portfolio as soon as sometime in 2026.

In response to council members’ questions over Entergy’s receptiveness to transmission planning, Long said Entergy has transmission planned that might have helped the May 25 situation: a 230-kV Adams Creek-to-Robert line and 230-kV and 500-kV reliability projects around the Amite South load pocket.

However, Lewis said those planned projects appear tailored to serve growing industrial load and aren’t “necessarily combatting the transmission lock hold” that exists in the South.

Long likened the upgrades to a “tide that raises all ships,” meaning they will serve new load while strengthening MISO South’s system.

Lewis asked if Entergy believes FERC’s Order 1920 is a positive development. Long said he would have to read Order 1920 first to answer the question.

Long added that Entergy got to work as quickly as it could to rebuild the 19 damaged structures of the Jennings 500-kV line before summer. However, he said the company encountered some supply chain issues getting steel to finish repairs.

Consumer Advocate Faults Regulator Inaction

Consumer and environmental advocate Alliance for Affordable Energy held a June 2 virtual town hall meeting where they asked the public to pressure regulators to demand meaningful planning from Entergy.

Yvonne Cappel-Vickery, an organizer with the alliance, said this “won’t be the last load-shed event unless we deploy solutions.” She said Louisianans need demand response programs and renewables paired with battery storage in the short term and more transmission capacity in the long term.

“We need more lanes, and we need more highways to move power,” Cappel-Vickery said. She said despite “finger-pointing” over blackouts, elected officials in the New Orleans City Council and the Louisiana Public Service Commission deserve much of the blame.

Cappel-Vickery said it’s the elected officials’ responsibility to push utilities to incorporate assets like battery storage and plan long-term transmission. She said they’ve been derelict in their duties to guide utilities and need to be “held accountable for the situation they have created.”

The Alliance for Affordable Energy denounced Entergy for suggesting MISO alone was the originator of the curtailments.

“While MISO ordered the load shed to limit larger outages, inaction by Entergy, Cleco and their elected regulators created the conditions requiring those blackouts,” the Alliance wrote in a June 2 letter to the New Orleans City Council. “This blackout could have potentially been avoided if regulators had been consistently pushing our regulated utilities to begin regional transmission planning and investment years ago. Instead of encouraging utilities to begin transmission planning, Louisiana regulators have allowed costly consultants to quibble over cost allocation methodologies without finding a solution.”

“It was a perfect storm with this one. It was a lot of unplanned outages,” Southern Renewable Energy Association Transmission Director Andy Kowalczyk summed up during the webinar. He said MISO acted swiftly to dodge a more serious outage that could have taken several days to resolve.

Kowalczyk appeared at the council meeting to request MISO South get similar planning treatment as MISO Midwest. He also said grid operators are time and again “caught off guard” with unplanned outages of thermal generation and said utility-scale renewable energy and storage could assist the region.

Meanwhile, Louisiana Public Service Commissioner Eric Skrmetta did not address the southeastern Louisiana blackouts when he appeared during The Hill’s “Securing the Grid: Powering the Gulf South Region” June 2 conference and webinar sponsored by Entergy.

Skrmetta focused instead on outages in the aftermath of hurricanes. He said while post-storm outages years ago lasted “18-20 days,” outages now last one to two days. He said outages in the Gulf South are inevitable while the Louisiana PSC works with utilities and urged public patience.

Skrmetta also touted Louisiana’s low electricity rates and said they’re the product of the commission being tough on utilities.

“We put strong demands on our utilities to achieve these goals. … We don’t actually knuckle under to our utilities. We work this out,” Skrmetta said. “We’ve trimmed off things that we don’t think the ratepayers should be paying for.”

Skrmetta said he wanted more industrial load and power plants to come to Louisiana and said he’s “agnostic” about the types of industry attracted to the region or the types of electricity that ultimately serve them.

“Whatever the cocktail of megawatts that they’re searching for, Louisiana is going to provide that,” he said.

The Louisiana PSC will hold its own hearing over the blackout on June 18.