Entergy New Orleans launches $1B grid hardening effort
Entergy New Orleans announces $1B grid hardening effort | Utility Dive
In the face of increasingly severe extreme weather, Entergy New Orleans on Tuesday launched a $1 billion grid hardening program, which must be approved by city officials.
The 10-year plan, called Operation: Gridiron, would be put in place in two five-year phases, according to Entergy’s proposal with the New Orleans city council. Entergy proposed spending about $559 million in the plan’s first phase, according to a mid-April filing with the city council.
The plan would cut outage times by more than half and save customers millions of dollars, Entergy said. It calls for upgrading thousands of poles to withstand 150 mph winds and hardening 650 miles of power lines.
Entergy estimates its proposed first phase would save customers about $216 million in storm restoration costs over 50 years.
If approved, Entergy would file progress reports with the city council every six months.
Entergy proposed recovering its costs via a “resilience and storm hardening” cost rider to be added to customer bills.
“Without timely and efficient cost recovery for the projects, [Entergy New Orleans’] financial health likely would be further compromised given the amount of the expenditures involved over an extended period,” the utility said.
Entergy asked the city council to approve its plan by the end of the year.
After Hurricane Ida in 2021, the New Orleans city council directed Entergy and other stakeholders, such as the Alliance for Affordable Energy, to offer measures to increase the city’s grid resiliency.
Related Knowledge Center: Offshore wind energy
Over the next decade, U.S. offshore wind power is expected to grow from a single 30-megawatt wind farm off Rhode Island to more than 2,000 MW of capacity along the Atlantic Seaboard. There are contracts for wind power off the coasts of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Maryland, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Virginia.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has estimated the United States has over 4,000 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind potential, enough to power the country four times over.
The growth in part being spurred by state solicitations, including in New York, where then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) set a commitment of 9,000 MW of offshore wind by 2035, and in Connecticut, where in June 2021, Gov. Ned Lamont (D) signed legislation authorizing the construction of 2,000 MW of offshore wind by 2030.
The offshore development is also being driven by an investment tax credit set to end in December 2019 and is equal to 12 percent of expenditures. U.S. Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Tom Carper (D-Del.) have introduced a bill to extend the tax credit for up to eight years.
The Interior Department has held eight competitive lease sales that resulted in 15 offshore wind leases over 1.7 million acres that has the potential for 21 GW of capacity. In February 2022, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management completed a bidding process that realized $4.37 billion for 488,000 acres across six lease areas in federal waters off New York and New Jersey.
Projects have also been proposed off the Southeast coast, off California and Hawaii, and for the Great Lakes.