A day after widespread outages left around 100,000 homes and businesses without power in the New Orleans area, utilities stressed that the grid now appears stable, but local officials vowed to press for answers over how and why it occurred.
The outages on Sunday hit homes served by Entergy and Cleco in parts of Orleans, Jefferson, St. Tammany, St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes. The popular Greek Festival along Bayou St. John was also affected, forcing it to take cash only for a period of time and extend its hours with free entry.
Both Entergy and Cleco said that, while they did not anticipate further outages, they were continuing to monitor the grid. Power was restored on Sunday night.
The utilities have indicated that the "load-shed" outage was ordered to protect critical infrastructure from sustaining more serious damage. High electricity demand due to scorching May temperatures, combined with low electricity supply from a nuclear generator being out of commission and a second power plant going offline, led to the outages.
Utilities and the grid operator stressed that, had power not been cut, the damage to infrastructure could have been worse.
"If the power supply cannot meet the demand, periodic power outages could be needed to protect the stability of the power grid and prevent widespread lengthy outages," said Jennifer Cahill, Cleco's director of corporate communications. "This was the case yesterday when we took the unprecedented step, as directed by MISO, to force outages to some customers in St. Tammany Parish."
Entergy, the electrical utility that serves the New Orleans area, also said that it would continue to monitor the grid closely.
"Entergy continues to work with MISO to understand their directive yesterday to suddenly shed load," said Beau Tidwell, an Entergy spokesperson. "While at this time we do not anticipate the need to ask customers to conserve electricity or to implement any load-shedding measures, our teams remain prepared to respond quickly should conditions change."
'A very last resort'
Andy Kowalczyk, the transmission director for Southern Renewable Energy Association, a trade organization that advocates for renewable energy companies, noted, too, that if the power hadn't been cut, it could have led to significant damage to infrastructure that could have taken a long time to fix.
"We could have had harmonics issues that are blowing up transformers" and damaging substations, he said, leading to the type of cascading power outages that led to a major blackout that affected around 50 million people in the northeast in 2003.
The outage raises questions about why the spike in electricity usage caught MISO, the grid operator that ordered the outage, off guard, local officials said. Some also alleged that MISO granted only a short notice for the outage directive.
"High temperatures in Louisiana led to higher-than-expected demand, and with planned and unplanned transmission and generation outages, MISO needed to take this action as a very last resort," the grid operator said in a statement on X on Sunday evening.
MISO did not respond to a request for further comment.
Davante Lewis, who represents the New Orleans area at the statewide Public Service Commission, which regulates utilities, was among those raising questions about why the forecasts for energy usage underestimated electricity demand on Sunday.
"We know that DOGE has made large cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which is responsible for producing the weather forecasts" that are used by MISO to predict energy demand, Lewis said. "If there is a situation where we are now getting faulty weather and faulty climate data that's making it hard ... to adequately predict demand, then this could become a serious problem that we're going to be facing more frequently."
He noted that a similar power outage was ordered in Shreveport earlier this month for similar reasons, and he worries that there may be a larger problem with the forecasting that MISO is using to predict electricity usage.
Two nuclear power plants, both operated by Entergy, were out of commission as of May 23 and remained so on Sunday, according to the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission's website and local officials. One was down for planned maintenance. The other went offline last week, and "tripped" as Entergy tried to bring it back online, Lewis said.
It was not clear on Monday what caused the plant to unexpectedly go dark. One of the two was back online on Monday.
'Going to have a fight'
Lewis noted that maintenance on power plants is often scheduled for the spring, when electricity demand is typically lower than it is at the height of summer or in the depths of winter, when households use power to heat or cool their homes.
Eric Skrmetta, who also serves on the Public Service Commission, laid the blame firmly on MISO. "I have not been able to get MISO to tell me why the outage was necessary," he said. "We're going to have a fight."
Who is to blame, and what exactly caused the power outage, will be subject to public scrutiny in the days ahead. Lewis said that he and New Orleans City Council Vice President Helena Morena would organize a joint Public Service Commission and City Council hearing with Entergy and MISO, though that hearing has not yet been scheduled. Skrmetta indicated that the outage would be front and center at the next PSC meeting on June 18.
While public officials may be quick to cast blame, Kowalczyk stressed that figuring out exactly what happened will take time.
"It will take a month or two to get to the root cause here," he said. "It's not about who is at fault, primarily. It's about what is at fault."
He noted that the South was about a decade behind where it should be in terms of planning for improvements to the grid.
"We need a more robust system," he noted. "But transmission takes a while to build. Energy efficiency would be great. More energy storage would be awesome. As would having a diversity of generation options."