State utility commissioner says one plant was offline for maintenance and another failed unexpectedly, forcing grid operator MISO to order rolling outages.
NEW ORLEANS — WWL Louisiana has learned the region’s two nuclear power plants were down Sunday, causing widespread power outages in the New Orleans area.
According to state Public Service Commissioner Davante Lewis, Waterford 3 in Killona on the west bank of St. Charles Parish was scheduled to be offline for maintenance. River Bend in St. Francisville, north of Baton Rouge unexpectedly tripped offline, and there wasn’t enough energy in the region to meet demand.
“For a scheduled outage to occur and a generator to fail simply should not cause a load shedding event,” Lewis said. “That means there’s more to the story — either bad forecasting, bad modeling or higher demand than was projected.”
Lewis said it’s unclear why River Bend failed.
According to Entergy, the forced outages were directed by MISO as a last resort and done to prevent a more extensive, prolonged power outage that could have severely affected the reliability of the power grid.
The Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) is a regional transmission organization that manages the electric grid in portions of 15 states, including Louisiana in the South and Midwest, and parts of Canada.
Lewis claims Entergy should share some of the blame for the outages.
“If we had more significant solar and battery storage, we could have been able to use some of those immediate resources for the short time to keep the lights on,” Lewis said. “If we had better transmission, we could have flowed power from other parts of the state and other parts of this nation to keep power on.”
More than 100,000 customers lost electricity during the series of rolling blackouts Sunday. Approximately 52,000 customers were impacted in the city of New Orleans. Outages were also reported in Jefferson, St. Bernard, Plaquemines, St. Tammany and Washington parishes.
As of Monday morning, power had been fully restored across the New Orleans area.
Entergy released this statement Tuesday afternoon:
“Entergy continues to work with MISO to understand their directive yesterday to suddenly shed load. Our teams are continuing to monitor the high electricity demand across the region today. While at this time we do not anticipate the need to ask customers to conserve electricity or to implement any load-shedding measures, our teams remain prepared to respond quickly should conditions change.”
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