Power Shift

The New Orleans Power Station is what’s known as a peaker plant, designed as a backup source of electricity whenever there’s a power shortage. The city gets nearly all of its electricity from gas, coal, and nuclear power plants outside of its borders. If a disastrous storm cuts New Orleans off from those outside power sources, the peaker plant could provide some locally generated electricity to tide residents over.

Crucially, the New Orleans Power Station was designed to be able to perform a “black start” — meaning it can start up on its own without needing a jolt from the grid. Ida had devastated the electricity grid, taking out all eight transmission lines that bring power into the city, creating exactly the type of scenario for the gas-fired plant to prove that it was worth its $210 million price tag.

It never performed a black start. Residents sat for days without power during scorching heat and stifling humidity. Widespread outages lingered across New Orleans until September 9th, 11 days after Ida. Without power, most people couldn’t find relief with air conditioning, fans, or ice. More people died in New Orleans from the heat that followed Ida than perished during the height of the storm’s wrath. Outside of the city, residents in more rural areas were left in the dark for more than a week longer. 

Now, New Orleans faces tough decisions ahead as Louisiana continues to recover after Ida. What should the wrecked grid look like in the future? Can it be safeguarded from another storm? Who gets to call the shots?

For McWilliams and some of her neighbors who came together to try to stop the peaker plant from being built, the answers were clear long before Ida hit. They want a shift in power: from dirty fossil fuels to clean energy and from top-down decision making to bottom-up solutions.

Dawn Hebert bought her home, a stately two-story brick house framed by four pillars out front, across the street from Wright in the 1990s. But the neighborhood hasn’t really been the same since levees failed to hold back Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters in 2005. Driving through New Orleans East, Hebert can rattle off the names of businesses lining the road that never came back after the storm. Off the I-10, there’s the dusty abandoned lot where Lake Forest Plaza used to stand, once the biggest shopping center in the state. What was once a Six Flags amusement park is now overgrown, empty ruins.

“I have been a big advocate, honestly, since Katrina,” says Hebert, who is now president of the East New Orleans Neighborhood Advisory Commission. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would be in the position I’m in right now,” Hebert says of her work holding the city accountable for how it treats New Orleans East. She and other residents have grown used to having to stand up for themselves. 

Adding insult to injury after the floodwaters receded, city officials proposed a plan to rebuild the city without including much of New Orleans East — instead shrinking the city’s footprint and allowing wetlands to reclaim areas deemed too flood-prone to revive.

Public outrage ultimately kept New Orleans East on the map. But the community soon became a sort of sacrifice zone for the rest of the city’s recovery. The remains of thousands of destroyed homes and buildings needed to be buried. The city picked New Orleans East to be the final resting place. A freshly dug landfill — which lacked a clay liner to prevent nasty leaks — took in about 150,000 tons of garbage in four months before residents in the nearby Vietnamese American community successfully rallied to shut it down. 

About a decade later, many of the same residents found themselves defending their neighborhoods yet again from another new source of pollution: the gas-burning New Orleans Power Station, to be operated by the local energy utility Entergy. It would be built at the site of retired generators that were even more polluting. “They try to put everything bad out here for our community that is environmentally unsafe,” Hebert says. After getting calls about the power plant proposal from her neighbor Wright and other advocates, Hebert set up a meeting between the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, the East New Orleans Neighborhood Advisory Commission, and other groups to let the community know about the plans.

It was the beginning of yet another standoff over the future of New Orleans East. “Oh my God, that was a whirlwind,” Hebert recalls. At city council meetings, Hebert and her friends faced apparent supporters of the power plant who showed up wearing matching orange shirts and carrying signs with phrases like, “We need power in the city.” Some were actually actors, hired to promote the plant. One of Entergy’s subcontractors had paid them between $60 to $200 each, The Lens reported, and the city ultimately fined Entergy $5 million for the fiasco. Now, attendees who want to give public comment at city council meetings have to check a box at the bottom of a speaker card to identify if they are “a paid representative or receiving any type of compensation or thing of value in exhange [sic] for speaking or attending today.” 

Hebert and McWilliams had a crew of their own standing up for New Orleans East. “You had environmental injustice, you know, building these plants around African Americans, Vietnamese Americans,” says McWilliams. “We were out there fighting the fight, fighting for them, fighting for us. We don’t want this; we don’t need this. Go with more renewable energy: wind and solar!”

Renewable energy would carry a few benefits for the area: it would improve air quality and reduce greenhouse gas emissions that fuel stronger storms. On top of that, critics of the plant believed there were better ways to strengthen the existing power grid than building a new fossil-fueled power plant. Aging power lines, which Entergy was previously fined for poorly maintaining, are an especially easy target for storms. So if the city really wanted to harden the grid, it ought to upgrade and fortify those lines, experts said. But the way utility regulation works in the US generally incentivizes companies to spend more money on new capital investments in things like new power plants rather than on maintenance costs for upgrading old power lines. 

“Basically, we did not need the plant. And why are you paying for something that we don’t need? It’s just crazy,” says Hebert. 

This time, she and other New Orleans East advocates lost the battle. Entergy successfully sold the plant as a way to make the grid more dependable in times of crisis. “It will provide a reliable local source of power generation in Orleans Parish to help stabilize the grid and keep the lights on,” then-president and CEO of Entergy New Orleans Charles Rice wrote in an opinion arguing for the new plant on Nola.com in 2017.

City council approved the plant in 2018, and it came online last year.

Rather than perform a black start at the power station, the quicker and safer way to restore power was to get one of the transmission lines back online, Rodriguez said. With a jolt of power from the transmission line, the plant then fired up and helped distribute some electricity throughout the city. 

The power plant hadn’t prevented extended blackouts, though. Some people — including Dawn Hebert — got power back within two days, while others waited 10 or more days. Even after firing up, the plant wasn’t able to get electricity to places where distribution lines were still down. The power station wasn’t designed to generate enough power for the entire city. Instead, it had capacity to meet just under 12 percent of the city’s needs, and the power first flowed to critical infrastructure like hospitals after Ida passed through. 

“New Orleans Power Station did what it was designed to do during and following the storm,” Entergy said to The Verge in an email. The utility company referred to residents’ expectation that the plant would prevent outages as “an unfortunate misunderstanding influenced by inaccurate reporting.” Power plants are designed to shut down when lines connecting them to customers are damaged or destroyed, it said.

Even as power started to come back on, Entergy’s outage maps had glitches. They showed that power was restored in McWilliams’ area even though it wasn’t — seeing the alerts, some residents planned to check out of hotels where they had taken shelter and return. McWilliams spent the days afterward fielding calls from neighbors who had evacuated, telling them it still wasn’t safe to come back. “No, we do not have electricity, do not come back yet,” McWilliams told them. She didn’t get electricity back in her home until a week after the storm. 

Rodriguez carefully answered questions from council members, prefacing by saying that a class action lawsuit filed against the utility by customers limited how much she could share. When city council finished asking questions, it was time for public comment. As the first speaker took to the podium, Rodriguez and other representatives from Entergy got up from their hot seats in the front of the chambers and walked out of the room.

The majority of comments were made online, which city council began accepting during the COVID-19 pandemic. There were too many to get through, so a designated speaker read as many as they could in 20 minutes. One woman described riding out the outages with her four-year-old child. “I tried my best to be cheerful and positive for my first real experience with a hurricane, being eight and a half months pregnant made it nearly impossible to maintain good cheer in the unmitigated late summer heat,” she shared.

When it was her turn, Hebert stepped up to the podium in a sky blue blouse over white pants and addressed the elephant that was not in the room. “I got to say, the fact that all of them [from Entergy] left means I don’t think they care too much,” Hebert said. “Entergy New Orleans should be held accountable, and changes that should be made are in your control,” she said to the council members.

City council members, responding to Hebert and other speakers, decided to call Entergy representatives back into the room. They returned about 45 minutes after leaving, claiming to have been watching from outside.

Governor John Bel Edwards signed an executive order last year setting a goal for the state to cut or cancel out all of its planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. In May, the New Orleans City Council passed a new energy standard that pushes Entergy to get all its electricity from “clean” sources by the same date. Entergy says it wants to increase its reliance on renewable energy to meet a company goal of reaching net zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 — keeping it in line with the state’s targets. 

It might sound like a short timeline for an energy state to kick its fossil fuel habit, but the deadline falls in line with what research has found is necessary globally to keep temperatures from rising to a point at which human civilization would struggle to adapt. The Biden administration is similarly trying to set the US on course to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. On the way there, Biden envisions a “100 percent” clean power grid by 2035. So what plays out in New Orleans is a microcosm for the energy transition that’s ahead for other oil and gas towns and the US as a whole. 

Slowing down climate change is a global problem. But adapting to changes that are already here — like stronger storms — will require local solutions. That’s especially true for electricity grids like New Orleans’, prone to climate-fueled disasters. Nearly all of the city’s electricity comes from somewhere else, some of it sourced from generators as far away as Mississippi and Arkansas. That’s typical of how electricity grids work today. Giant fossil-fueled power plants and nuclear reactors generate enough power for expansive areas. Electricity from the plants zips along transmission lines, which transport power across long distances at high voltages. The electricity makes a pit stop at a substation near its final destination, sometimes hundreds of miles from the power plant, where the voltage is tamped down so that it’s safer to move through neighborhoods via local distribution lines. 

Each of those points — power plant, transmission line, substation, distribution line — could be vulnerable to a disaster like Ida. A storm only needs to take out one link in the chain to cut off power to many communities.

Shrinking down the grid and generating power locally is one way to minimize those vulnerabilities. In fact, there’s already a blueprint for how that could work. In 2017, the Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratories worked with the City to come up with a plan for how it could make the energy system more resilient to future hurricanes. That research identified advanced microgrids as one potential solution.

“We cannot be thinking about the electric system in that linear way anymore,” says Logan Atkinson Burke, executive director of the local consumer advocacy group Alliance for Affordable Energy. “Think about the whole of the system, rather than thinking about the way the system was built 120 years ago.” 

Here’s how advanced microgrids might work: First of all, energy is generated locally. That can bypass one potential weak point — transmission lines that bring power in from faraway places. Solar panels, in particular, are easy to spread around the city and still tie together so that they can work in tandem. They could be clustered together in a solar farm, like the one at the NASA facility. Or they could be spread across homes and buildings throughout the city. More than 90 percent of rooftops in the city of New Orleans are well-suited for solar generation, according to one Google analysis. 

There was already a boom in residential solar after Katrina, thanks to post-storm tax incentives. The city ranked 14th in the nation for the most solar capacity installed per capita in 2020, ahead of sunny Los Angeles. But to be helpful in a crisis, panels will also need to be paired with batteries that can store extra juice for a rainy day. And local distribution lines will also need to be sturdy enough to keep all those solar panels and batteries connected to each other.

If disaster strikes, especially if it knocks out other parts of the larger grid, an advanced microgrid can automatically cut itself off and act as a sort of energy island. Outfitted with an advanced microgrid, New Orleans East would be one area that’s particularly well-suited to act as a “resilience node,” according to the Sandia analysis. That’s where a relatively small amount of backup generation could power a high concentration of critical infrastructure serving a large population.

“We’ve been urging Entergy to look at things like microgrids,” Burke says. “Instead, all the money that Entergy has been spending is on their gas infrastructure.” 

Entergy tells The Verge that it spent $3.9 billion on its transmission and distribution systems between 2016 and 2020. “It is important to invest in generation, transmission, and distribution, and Entergy has no financial incentive to prefer one over another,” Entergy said to The Verge in an email. “Physics dictates how we invest to keep the system reliable and keep the lights on.”

On an even smaller scale, solar power and batteries can benefit individual homes. That’s how Devin De Wulf’s household kept the lights on during and after Ida. His family weathered the blackout with his refrigerator, ice machine, and fans. He avoided using the central air conditioning because that would have taken up too much power, but he’s since bought a small window AC unit that he can plug in and power on with the batteries the next time a storm knocks power out.

DeWulf, who founded nonprofit organizations that bring food to essential workers, musicians, and artists during the pandemic, helped out his neighbors with his solar system. He set out a power strip on his porch so that others could charge their phones or other devices. And he ran an extension cord to a neighbor two doors down so that he could run his oxygen machine. 

“Nobody cares about us, but us,” DeWulf tells The Verge. “We have to be the first responders.”

DeWulf’s next project is an initiative to get solar and batteries to restaurants around the city so that they can do the same thing for their communities.  

In the absence of a disaster, microgrids can still function as part of the larger grid system that connects the rest of Louisiana and nearby states. When the larger grid is up and running, a household can sell its excess solar power back to the utility to lower its bills. 

That bi-directional flow of power is crucial for any future grid that’s built on more renewable energy. It’s another reason why Burke and other advocates have called for more investment in upgraded transmission lines. Sunshine and wind gusts are intermittent sources of energy — they’re renewable, but they can only be tapped at certain times. Luckily, they can also fill in for each other. When the sun is shining brightly on the Gulf Coast, the region can send its solar energy up to the colder midwest. Midwestern states and Texas, where a lot of wind energy is generated, can, in turn, send their renewable energy down in exchange. 

Instead of the linear grid system where electricity flows in one direction from polluting generators, it’s a system built on two-way communication. And even though utility scale wind and solar farms (paired with batteries and other power sources like hydroelectricity) will be needed to meet everyone’s electricity needs, a single home solar system can still contribute when its power is needed.

Grids in other climate-stressed places are already evolving with the help of renewable energy. In California, where more intense wildfire seasons have sparked blackouts, solar panels and batteries spread across apartment buildings work together as a virtual power plant. There are similar projects in Utah and Arizona. Even the batteries in electric vehicles could one day be tied together to provide backup power in disaster scenarios.