Can you expect high Entergy bills this winter? Company explains recent outages - WAFB

Can you expect high Entergy bills this winter? Company explains recent outages

BATON ROUGE, La. (WAFB) - After an extremely hot summer of high utility bills, many Capital City families are looking ahead to what they can expect this winter.

A spokesperson with Entergy said it’s hard to predict what bills will look like right now, but he said they see bills fluctuate during the extreme summer and winter months.

There’s no telling how harsh of a winter we’re going to have but the company said to plan as if we could have one.

David Freese with Entergy said many factors play into high utility bills, such as the cost of natural gas. More than 50% of the power that Entergy Louisiana produces comes from natural gas plants. So when natural gas prices increased in the summer of 2022, he said it caused the electricity prices to rise with it.

Good news for folks at home, natural gas prices are much lower than they were then.

“Hopefully it stays that way,” said Freese. “But again, it’s something that Entergy doesn’t control. It’s actually deregulated. And so we are going to keep an eye on that. But one thing that customers can do or to control utility bills is largely around usage. The less electricity they use, the less electricity they consume, the lower their bills can be. So that’s why we really raised awareness around energy efficiency measures ahead of the summer in the winter months.”

The utility industry recommends keeping the thermostat at 68 degrees or the most comfortable setting during the winter months, he said. More than 50% of your bill can be attributed to your heating and cooling costs within a home. Also, open up the blinds and let that sun come in to help warm your home.

Level billing may also be an option for your family. It averages your monthly Entergy bill over a rolling twelve-month period, so your bill is around the same amount each month. It avoids surprises during extreme weather months. You can learn more about the program here.

Freese said they’re they’re working on multiple projects right now ahead of the cold months. Crews added several new steel transmission poles along Nicholson Dr. that will serve the LSU campus and surrounding areas. Crews also just completed a project to build a new overhead line that’s serving neighborhoods like the Reserve at Conway in Gonzales.

Recent outages were caused by an underground cable failure. Freese said they went in and identified the work that needed to be done and built the new overhead distribution line that’s feeding that area.

They’re also continuing to improve the electric system near LSU after two outages between August and September. One was related to a transmission line that slipped out of a sleeve conductor. They have since upgraded them.

They’re also working on several other reliability projects across Baton Rouge with a data-driven approach.

“So we have own outage data that we look at, we have teams that are dedicated to looking at this data, and then determining okay, these are the circuits we may want to focus on,” said Freese. “Let’s go out in the field and either visually inspect them, use technology to inspect it, and come up with a plan to improve reliability for those particular neighborhoods in areas that may have seen multiple outages so that that dedicated team is currently working towards identifying projects and performing the reliability work to make sure the electric system is stronger,” said Freese.

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