The Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) was questioned by New Orleans city council members on Tuesday after a massive power outage during Memorial Day weekend left hundreds of thousands without electricity.
MISO walking city council leader through their decisions and plans moving forward as they seek solutions to prevent future incidents.
MISO directors said they directed Entergy and Cleco to implement rolling blackouts, known as load shedding, to prevent major reliability issues and outages across the region. They attributed their decision to generator and transmission issues, planned and unplanned outages, and warmer temperatures.
City council members expressed concern that New Orleans was collateral damage, as the outage primarily affected the New Orleans and Slidell areas for several hours. “How do we prevent casualties because at the end of the day, the person that needs that electricity and needs that power, that can be life or death for them,” a council member said.
MISO was supposed to notify officials within 30 minutes, but failed to do so, despite knowing the system was strained and their efforts to reconfigure were no longer working. Entergy made the decision on which areas would be impacted. “We chose those based on three criteria. The first is to get the maximum number of relief we can get on the transmission line. The second was to interrupt the fewest customers possible, and then the third was to avoid making the problem worse,” Entergy said.
Ultimately, MISO said they are working to correct their communication failures and ensure this magnitude of an outage doesn’t happen again. “Just because there isn’t a notification system now, there isn’t a reason we couldn’t put one in,” MISO said. They are considering implementing pre-warning signals or indicators to notify people if similar conditions arise on the system.
READ MORE:New Orleans power outage probe, MISO grilled by city council
