Members of the Louisiana Public Service Commission and the New Orleans City Council are demanding answers from utility companies and the agency that oversees the regional power grid following Sunday's brown out that left more than 100,000 people without electricity.
Entergy said the Midcontinent Independent System Operator ordered the brown out to prevent the regional grid from being overloaded. According to Louisiana Public Service Commissioner Davante Lewis, who represents New Orleans on the PSC, MISO reported that one of its generators was offline for maintenance when another that powers the area failed. At the same time, Lewis said, demand for electricity was greater than anticipated.
That brown out left residents in parts of New Orleans, Jefferson Parish, St. Bernard Parish, Plaquemines Parish, and St. Tammany Parish without lights or air conditioning for several hours on Sunday afternoon while temperatures were in the mid-90s and heat indices were in the low-100s.
Lewis says he wants MISO officials to come before the Public Service Commission to explain why the forecast for energy usage was so inaccurate that it forced a power outage the state's third brown out in three months.
New Orleans city council members have similar questions.
"We are not only frustrated by the lack of timely notification to both the utility and regulators, and it appears that New Orleans bore the brunt of this forced outage," council President J. P. Morrell and council Vice President Helena Moreno said in a joint statement with Lewis. "The public deserves clear answers regarding the reasons behind this incident and the failure to provide timely alerts."
Councilman Joe Giarusso, whose district covers Lakeview and other parts of the city impacted by the outage, echoed those sentiments on Twitter.
"According to Entergy, this is a load shed event as directed by MISO," Giarusso wrote. "That means it is intentional. The question is why?"
