Ida Is Proof That Louisiana Needs To Embrace Building Microgrids
Last week, Hurricane Ida knocked out all 8 transmission lines into New Orleans. In Baton Rouge, it took out our communications along with our electricity — with the exception of those who had Verizon. Although most of Baton Rouge is getting back online, New Orleans as well as smaller towns and cities still don’t have power.
Someone shared an article by Canary Media with me, and after reading it, I fully agree. We need microgrids here in Louisiana, yet our leaders don’t seem to want them. Advocates have been trying for years to make our local grid resilient, but oddly, our leaders don’t seem to want that. Why?
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen governments (local, state, etc.) purposely refuse to do things that benefit everyone. It’s like they want us to have messed up grids so that we suffer during disasters. The article cited another article by Canary Media that showed the outcome following local authorities’ repeated dismissals of proposals to invest in decentralized and resilient grid upgrades.
In 2016, a New Orleans-based nonprofit, Alliance for Affordable Energy, had a great alternative to Entergy New Orleans’ plan to build a new natural-gas-fired power plant. That idea was to build clean electricity resilience from the ground up — an integrated resilience plan that challenged Entergy New Orleans to try to find an alternative to a central power plant. The plant would be subject to known vulnerabilities — such as the impact of a category 4 hurricane.
The Alliance for Affordable Energy called for pursuing distributed microgrids. The article aptly described these as self-powered islands of solar power, batteries, and backup generation that could provide electricity during grid outages. If only we had these during Ida. Executive director Logan Atkinson Burke shared how this was frustrating. “Had we taken the time and initiative to plan for distributed generation, distributed solar-plus-storage, and more energy efficiency, people would be more prepared to shelter safely and comfortably,” Burke said. “We’ve been advocating for microgrids to be built within the city for years for precisely this reason.”
Here’s Why Entergy Doesn’t Want Distributed Energy
The problem is Entergy’s long-standing opposition to distributed energy. The utility has consistently opposed including local renewable energy and energy storage in its own plans. Utilities also get an incentive when they convince regulators to approve large power plants instead of enabling customer-sited distributed energy such as rooftop solar. The article pointed out that vertically integrated utilities such as Entergy are paid a guaranteed rate of return on capital investments, including power plants. Self-supplied customer energy reduces the revenue and profits Entergy and other utilities earn from selling electricity.
It’s all about money, profits, and greed. They make more money from weakening our defenses against disasters such as Ida than they would from strengthening them. And we, the people, end up paying the price. And our government readily caters to this greed. Not just Louisiana’s — this trend is seen elsewhere as well.
Car dealerships in Connecticut, for example, lobby legislatures to prevent Tesla and Rivian from coming to their state and opening a sales center. This hurts the economy, but they do it anyway. It’s all about greed, money, and profits.
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Environment
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Global renewable developer and energy giant RWE has halted its US offshore wind operations “for the time being” because of the “political environment” the Trump administration has created.
RWE, Germany’s biggest electricity producer, said in March that it had dialed back its US offshore wind activities. But now, CEO Marcus Krebber said in a speech transcript, which he’ll deliver at the company’s Annual General Meeting in Essen on April 30, that its US offshore wind business is now closed (but it wasn’t all bad news):
In the US, where we have stopped our offshore activities for the time being, our business in onshore wind, solar energy, and battery storage has so far been developing very dynamically. At the start of this year, we reached an important milestone when our US generation capacity hit the 10 gigawatt mark. The construction of a further 4 gigawatts is secured.
He went on to say that renewables have created regional value and jobs, but that the company remains “cautious given the political developments.” RWE has introduced more stringent requirements for future US investments:
All necessary federal permits must be in place. Tax credits must be safe harbored and all relevant tariff risks mitigated. In addition, onshore wind and solar projects must have secured offtake at the time of the investment decision. Only if these conditions are met will further investments be possible, given the political environment.
About half of RWE’s installed renewable capacity is in the US, where it’s the third-largest renewable energy company through its subsidiary, RWE Clean Energy. RWE holds the rights to develop US offshore wind projects in New York, Louisiana, and California.
RWE paid $1.1 billion for the New York lease area in 2022, where it’s meant to develop the 3 gigawatt (GW) Community Offshore Wind with the UK’s National Grid. Community Offshore Wind was projected to come online in the early 2030s and expected to power more than a million homes.
The developer paid $5.6 billion for the Louisiana lease in the Gulf of Mexico in 2023 as the lone bidder for development rights, and the Canopy Offshore Wind project off Northern California was not expected to be completed for another decade.
Read more: Trump admin halts $5 billion NY offshore wind project mid-build
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