Entergy apologizes for massive New Orleans area blackout

Days after a widespread and sudden power outage disrupted Memorial Day weekend plans across Southeast Louisiana, Entergy sent an email explaining what happened and apologizing to customers.

“We are deeply disappointed by Sunday’s outage event, which occurred when Entergy was directed by our reliability coordinator, MISO (the Midcontinent Independent System Operator), to bring many of our customers offline,” Entergy said in the email.

According to Entergy, the forced outages were directed by MISO as a last resort and done to prevent a more extensive, prolonged power outage that could have severely affected the reliability of the power grid.

More than 100,000 customers lost electricity during the series of rolling blackouts on Sunday. Approximately 52,000 customers were impacted in the city of New Orleans. Outages were also reported in Jefferson, St. Bernard, Plaquemines, St. Tammany, and Washington parishes.

“Entergy recognizes the May 25th outage ordered by MISO was not executed in a satisfactory way for our customers,” Entergy added in the email. “We regret that Entergy was not provided with enough prior notice of the outage to prepare our customers for the potential loss of power.”

Read the full statement below:

Dear Valued Customer,

We are deeply disappointed by Sunday’s outage event, which occurred when Entergy was directed by our reliability coordinator, MISO (the Midcontinent Independent System Operator), to bring many of our customers offline.

MISO oversees electric reliability across a 15-state region, including Entergy Louisiana and Entergy New Orleans. They monitor the transmission system and electricity demand to ensure grid stability across a wide footprint. If MISO determines the demand for electricity could exceed the available amount being generated, it sometimes orders companies like Entergy to shed load for a period of time. This is done to avoid a larger problem.

Entergy recognizes the May 25th outage ordered by MISO was not executed in a satisfactory way for our customers. We regret that Entergy was not provided with enough prior notice of the outage to prepare our customers for the potential loss of power.

Entergy continues to work with MISO to ensure alignment going forward regarding the usage modeling across our organizations. We have stressed to MISO the need to improve the amount of advance notice our company and our customers are given prior to any future event. While load shed events are incredibly rare, when they are ordered, the need must be clear to the utility and the advance warning should be maximized for the customer.

Despite this recent event, Entergy’s membership in MISO has been very beneficial for our customers – saving Louisiana customers alone hundreds of millions of dollars since our company joined in 2013. We fully expect these issues to be quickly resolved and our partnership with MISO to continue to benefit our customers.

Entergy recognizes the responsibility and trust that customers place in us to ensure that power stays on at their home or business. For that we sincerely apologize to those customers who had their Memorial Day Weekend disrupted by this event. You have our commitment and the commitment of our dedicated team of professionals to continue working on your behalf each and every day.

Thank you,

Deanna Rodriguez

President and CEO, Entergy New Orleans