Sunday's power outage has some New Orleans-area wondering: will brown outs become a regular occurrence?
According Greg Upton, the executive director of the LSU Center for Energy Studies, it's highly unlikely.
"I personally would be surprised if this becomes the new normal," Upton said to WWL's Dave Cohen on Monday, less than 24 hours after more than 100,000 homes and businesses in Southeast Louisiana after the Midcontinent Independent System Operator ordered the load shed in an attempt to reduce the strain on the regional power grid.
Upton says demand for electricity in the United States has been flat over the last 10 to 15 years. That, along with investments in grid reliability in the region and investments in export-oriented companies, is why Upton believes outages like Sunday's are unlikely to happen again here anytime soon.
However, Upton says the Public Service Commission must allow for those investments to be made.
"At the end of the day, the utilities are going to be willing to make investments, but, of course, the Public Service Commission is going to have to allow for those investments to be made because it's those investments that then go into the investments that then go into the rates that you and I, the rate payers, are paying," Upton said. "It's this balance of how much do you want to invest in this electric grid, and if you invest more, you'll have more capacity, better transmission, and all of these things that we like. On the flip side of that, we have to pay for those. It's going to be up to those regulators to decide how we strike that balance."
