New Orleans Getting Some Power Back

Very little power, but every little bit helps. Some customers in New Orleans East get power restored after Hurricane Ida Wednesday morning

It seems that some of the high-tension/high-voltage power lines that cut out when the tower collapsed and dumped other high-voltage transmission lines into the Mississippi River were not damaged, and are back on-line. That power enabled them to connect (reconnect?) the New Orleans East generating station to the grid. It generates about 128 megawatts of electricity, which is not nearly enough for the entire city. (See the link below.)

Reporters are also unclear on the idea that the utility can't say how long it will be to fix the problems, when they don't even have an accurate list of what all the problems are.

It was also not clear how long it would take to get additional electricity into the region served by those lines - which also includes Jefferson, Plaquemines and St. Bernard parishes - or what the timeline would be for getting more customers online.

The earlier report actually has more information on the overall status. Entergy NO CEO: New power plant could get electricity back to hospitals in 3 days, 'God willing.'

Entergy New Orleans CEO Deanna Rodriguez said she hopes the new gas-fired power plant in New Orleans East will help the utility restore power lost in Hurricane Ida to critical infrastructure, including hospitals now running on generators, in the "next three days, God willing."

A little more than an hour later, Mayor LaToya Cantrell relayed an even bolder promise from Entergy: that some of the high-voltage transmission lines feeding the New Orleans area from the outside world could come back online by Wednesday afternoon or evening.

All of that combined won't be nearly enough to restore power to all customers in the area, and there are power lines down in every part of the city, but it would be enough to power hospitals and emergency services. Hospitals, and emergency services generally, are all currently running on generators. To bring back power to all of the impacted region requires 1100 Megawatts of power, and they are hoping to restore about half that much in the coming days. Replacing the transmission lines that cross the river will take more time.

I have seen any number of "Why can't they just [fill in hair-brained scheme]" from a lot of people who don't know what capacitance, reactance, or inductance are, or how to calculate the amps consumed by an electrical load. And there is some of that in the second article linked above. But mostly there is anger at Entergy New Orleans over the failure of their power system. Suffice it to say that when you are dealing with 500,000 volts of AC power, you can't just "flip a switch."

That said, it will still be weeks before power is restored to every customer. It will take that long just to replace snapped telephone poles and replace/fix broken cables.