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most of New Orleans it got dark on sunday After Hurricane Ida disabled transmission lines and disabled power plants. It was a very familiar scene in a city that often lost power during major storms.

But it was an interruption that should never have happened. Electric company Entergy opened a new natural gas plant in the city last year, promising it will help keep the lights on. on hot summer days and big storms. It was one of two natural gas power plants commissioned in the New Orleans area in recent years, the other being last year by Gov. It was hailed by John Bel Edwards as “a source of clean energy that gives our government a competitive advantage and helps our communities grow.” ”

It raises new questions about the storm how well the energy industry is prepared for natural disastersthat many scientists believe is becoming more common due to climate change. This year, Most of Texas is plunged into darkness officials in California after a winter storm and last summer ordered power outages during a heat wave.

More than a million residential and commercial customers in Louisiana were without power Monday afternoon, and Entergy and other utilities serving the state said it would take days to assess damage to their equipment and weeks to fully restore service across the state. A customer may be a family or a large business, so the number of people without electricity is likely many times higher. Fewer than 100,000 customers were left without power in neighboring Mississippi.

Residents and government officials are now asking why the plant isn’t keeping electricity flowing to at least part of the city, and how all eight transmission lines that bring electricity to New Orleans from elsewhere went out of service at the same time – a failure that Entergy blames for Ida’s “catastrophic intensity”. over.

“If something happened to the transmission, this gas plant was supposed to power the city of New Orleans,” said Monique Harden, deputy director of public policy at the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, one of the leading organizations tackling gas. plant in the city. “This will take some research.”

Entergy did not immediately respond to requests for talks regarding the gas plant and transmission lines.

Extreme weather conditions linked to climate change have strained power grids across the country and left hospitals, governments, people and businesses without power for days or weeks, raising the bill for natural disasters. The storms revealed that energy companies and regulators are not doing enough to harden transmission lines and power plants to withstand extreme temperatures and winds. In some cases, power lines and other ancillary equipment have caused disasters such as: Some of California’s biggest and deadliest wildfires.

In February, a winter storm plunged most of Texas into darkness for days. Dozens of people died, often trying to stay warm. It soon became clear that power plants, natural gas pipelines and other infrastructures were not protected against freezing temperatures and that lawmakers took precautions. It’s impossible for Texas to import power by largely isolating the state grid from the rest of the country to avoid federal surveillance.

Energy experts said it was too early to say what happened to Entergy’s New Orleans gas plant and transmission lines and to learn from the storm. But natural disasters have highlighted the need for improvement, including to make grids less prone to major failures.

“Generally speaking, you certainly can’t build a system that can withstand any natural disaster,” said Larry Gasteiger, executive director of Wires, a trade association representing utilities that builds and operates high-voltage transmission lines. “But it does address the need to build a more flexible system.”

The Biden administration has planned tens of billions of dollars. add more transmission lines transporting more solar and wind power from one part of the country to another. But some energy experts said the increasing frequency of devastating hurricanes, wildfires and other disasters is against large investment in power lines and smaller-scale systems such as rooftop solar panels and batteries. Because many homes, businesses, schools, and other buildings have small systems installed, some continue to operate even when damaged, providing much-needed energy during and after a disaster.

Susan Guidry, a former member of the New Orleans City Council who voted against the Entergy power plant, said she was concerned that a storm like Ida could damage her city and its energy system. He wanted the city and municipality to consider other options. However, he said Council members and the civil service ignored these warnings.

“They said they were looking into this issue,” Ms Guidry said. As a result, they should have upgraded their transmission and invested in renewable energy instead.”

Numerous community groups and city leaders opposed the gas-fired power station that borders the predominantly African-American and Vietnamese-American neighborhoods just south of Interstate 10 and Lake Pontchartrain. However, the City Council approved the factory. Started commercial operation in May 2020. It mainly generates power during peak demand times.

About a year ago, Entergy was founded in nearby St. He opened a larger gas plant in Charles Parish. Leo P. Denault, president and CEO of Entergy, described the facility last year as “an important milestone in the clean energy journey we started more than 20 years ago.”

Some utilities have turned to burying transmission lines to protect them from strong winds and storms, but Mr Gasteiger said this is expensive and could cause problems of its own.

“Generally speaking, utilities aren’t willing to do that,” he said. “People are not willing to pay for it. Usually this is a cost issue. And undergrounding can make problems even harder to find and fix.

Major changes to electrical grids and power plants will likely take years, but activists and New Orleans residents say authorities need to explore solutions that can be implemented more quickly, especially as tens of thousands of people are without power for days or weeks. Some activists want authorities to prioritize investments in rooftop solar, batteries and microgrids that can power homes and commercial buildings even when larger grids fail.

“We’re continuing with solutions to keep people safe in their homes,” said Logan Atkinson Burke, executive director of Alliance for Affordable Energy, a New Orleans-based consumer group. “When these events happen, we are in crisis mode because instead we are spending billions of dollars each year rebuilding the same system that has left people in the dark, in a terrible situation.”

Some residents have already invested in small-scale energy systems for themselves. Julie Graybill and her husband Bob Smith installed solar panels and batteries in their New Orleans home after Hurricane Isaac hit Louisiana in 2012. They lost electricity for five days after Isaac, occasionally driving with two others to their car for air conditioning. Older dogs, said Ms. Graybill, 67, a retired Tulane University School of Medicine.

“We used to sit in the car every hour,” he said. “My husband said, ‘We’re never going to do this again.’” Mr. Smith, 73, who is also retired, worked as an engineer at the oil company Royal Dutch Shell.

The couple set up a small power station on their porch so neighbors can charge their phones and other belongings. Only a few houses on its streets have solar panels, but no one else nearby has batteries that can store the power produced by the panels and distribute it when the grid goes down.

“We were told we would be out of power for three weeks,” Ms. Graybill said. “People with power are just people with generators or solar panels. We had Katrina. This isn’t Katrina, so we’re lucky.”