The New Orleans City Council ripped into Entergy officials during a council committee meeting on Tuesday, complaining about frequent power outages in the city.
One council member told the Entergy representatives: don't ask for rate hikes until you figure out a solution.
"Until we get reliability under control, we're not giving any blank checks on resilience because we do not want you to pay extra for what you're already entitled to, and the sooner that Entergy can get reliability under control, the sooner we can collectively move forward on large resilience projects," council president J. P. Morrell said.
Entergy officials, meanwhile, said they're doing everything they can to minimize power outages in the city... adding that their actions are working.
"Entergy New Orleans has met the council's metrics for number and duration of outages," Entergy New Orleans CEO Deanna Rodriguez said.
That statement did little to placate Morrell.
"As long as reliability is still a dumpster fire, we can't really look at any resilience request without parsing through it to make sure reliability isn't in the resilience request," Morrell said. "The fact that we don't have an inventory plan that we can all point to collectively agree solves the problem is going to continually undermine resilience efforts to get robust investment."
