JEFFERSON PARISH, La. — After several power outages over the last few weeks, the Jefferson Parish council asked Entergy Louisiana what's been going on.
At Wednesday's council meeting, Entergy admitted there's been more outages in the parish than usual. According to an Entergy representative, faulty equipment has been the culprit multiple times.
"All of those outages involved equipment at one of our electric substations that performed and operated in a way that was unexpected, "said Michelle Bourg, Vice President of Customer Service at Entergy Louisiana. "And that’s why we saw so many customers impacted by those outages," she said.
Bourg said things like weather, vegetation, and damage to poles can also have an impact. While they revealed the causes they also spoke about the solutions.
"We are very pleased and happy to be moving forward with a resiliency program that the Louisiana Public Service Commission recently approved," Bourg said.
"It’s a specific program, with a specific focus with renewing our assets with resiliency in mind. So we know we’ve got infrastructure that can’t withstand 140, 150 mph wind loading," she said.
"So we want to proactively replace those poles so next time we’re challenged with a hurricane the scale of an Ida or Laura, we know that any infrastructure we proactively replaced, that will be installed with a new design basis and withstand that very powerful storm, will be standing in the face of the storm," Bourg added.
While council members were the ones doing the asking, they don't have any regulatory power over Entergy Louisiana -- the Louisiana Public Service Commission does. Two commissioners were at the meeting, but even they had differing ideas on how to hold Entergy accountable.
"The commission has authorized Entergy Louisiana to spend upwards of $1.9 billion on infrastructure improvement over the next five years," said Eric Skrmetta, who represents District 1.
"I want to be able to use zip codes and census blocks to say that certain neighborhoods, if they're experiencing surging outages for a consistent amount of time, [Entergy] would then be penalized," Davante Lewis, who represents District 3, said.
Wednesday, the council approved a resolution to ask the Public Service Commission to hire an independent company to take a look at Entergy and its practices.
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