New Orleans planned to use solar to withstand hurricanes. Years later, that hasn't come to fruition. (2024)

Nine years ago, New Orleans officials sketched out a way to keep the lights on in their storm-prone city after hurricanes: by building “area microgrids,” through which a combination of solar arrays and battery storage would power a group of buildings, even when the rest of the grid is offline.

The idea seemed prescient when Hurricane Ida crashed the city’s electric grid, operated by Entergy New Orleans, leaving thousands without power for weeks. If the city had built the microgrids, two areas in Gentilly that included a pump station might have kept power as the rest of the city sweltered in the summer heat.

But since coming up with the idea — and securing money for it as part of the $141 million, federally backed Gentilly Resilience District — the city still hasn’t started work.

As Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s administration sought to bring them to life, it ran into a roadblock: Entergy. The company cited safety and technical issues that could arise from allowing buildings to share power independently using the utility’s lines, and it refused to change its policies to allow the projects to move forward.

After years of delays and extended deadlines, the federal government, fed up with the Cantrell administration’s lack of progress, asked the city last month to come up with better uses for the millions that had been dedicated to the microgrids and another stormwater project.

Now, administration officials say they will spend the coming months trying to finally bring the projects to life. Joe Threat, head of the Department of Public Works, said he is considering an array of options, including scaled-down microgrids that would only power single buildings, or electric vehicle chargers. He said he’ll decide by late summer whether to move forward or use the money to cover overruns on other projects in the resilience district.

"That's the way of the future for us,” Threat said. “Most of our hurricanes come with a wind event that takes down the power grid. If we don't have underground power, we have poles that are going to go down and take the power down. For us, microgrids are the way to go."

Threat cited cyberattacks, the pandemic and Ida as culprits that delayed the microgrids and other resilience projects. And he said he had to pick up the ball from Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s administration, which hadn’t gotten any of the players involved. When the city finally reached out to Entergy and the Sewerage & Water Board, he said, neither organization was interested.

The failure to bring the projects to life has exasperated advocacy groups, who believe establishing such microgrids are a key part of making New Orleans livable in the face of climate change.

“It’s incredibly frustrating,” said Logan Burke, head of the Alliance for Affordable Energy.

The city has little to show for years of work, aside from “conversations” about building so-called islands of power using microgrids, Burke said. She said the delays mean New Orleans has lost crucial time in finding solutions to make the city safer in extended outages, which have proven deadly for vulnerable people in the summer heat.

“If we had been further down the road (during) Hurricane Ida, who knows what the opportunity cost was?” Burke said.

New technology

The Landrieu administration, which initially pitched the Gentilly Resilience District, wrote in its 2015 proposal that it wanted to address New Orleans’ frequent power outages.

Their solution: two microgrids. One, slated for Dillard University, would power a library, post office, bank, pharmacy, gas station, a pump station and the university. Another would power the London Avenue Canal pumps near the University of New Orleans, to make sure stormwater could continue to be expelled.

New Orleans has seen a spate of other planned and completed microgrid projects in recent years. For instance, the nonprofit SBP built a solar and battery microgrid at an affordable housing complex that kept the lights on after Ida. Together New Orleans, another nonprofit, has garnered national attention for a series of microgrids at community centers.

The Gentilly projects were different. Instead of powering a single building, the projects would take a group of adjacent buildings, connect them with solar panels and batteries, and share the power between all of them.

That difference is also why Entergy New Orleans rejected the idea.

The utility owns and operates the lines that the projects would use to transfer power between the various buildings. In letters to the Cantrell administration last year, Entergy argued that it would be unsafe for lineworkers to repair a section of the grid that may be powered, unbeknownst to the utility. The company also argued that it must maintain control of the grid at all times, and that a third party could damage its equipment and give rise to billing problems.

“The request for (Entergy) to operate a complicated and unsafe grid within its grid in an already challenging electrical environment, which increases risks to those stated priorities, is wholly unreasonable,” Entergy executive Keith Wood wrote last year.

Key roadblocks

A federal auditor issued a blistering report last month that flagged lengthy delays in the resilience district.

“If the City had sufficiently planned the projects, it would have determined that the Milneburg and Microgrid projects would fail early in the start of the program, and it could have reallocated the funds for these projects or created new projects that would have allowed for expeditious completion,” the auditor wrote.

In 2022, the city got some help. It tapped the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to help it evaluate a separate set of microgrids, and identify problems the city would need to solve to complete the Gentilly microgrids.

That group identified several other potential sites. Those included the former landfill on Agriculture Street in the Desire area, the Sanchez Center in the Lower Ninth Ward, the Joe Brown Recreation Center in New Orleans East and a Regional Transit Authority transit center downtown.

The Agriculture Street project would operate similarly to the microgrids envisioned for Gentilly. Greg Nichols, the city’s deputy chief resilience officer, said the city is planning to build a ground array of solar panels and power a section of the grid nearby — if it can overcome Entergy’s interconnection policy.

Nichols said that has been a key roadblock. And he said the administration has talked with City Council leaders and plans to push for a docket that could change the interconnection policy and make the projects possible.

"Interconnection policies are very dry, technical documents,” he said. “Clearly the Landrieu administration, when they wrote the grant, wasn't aware of it either. There were clearly a lot of people who were not aware of the interconnection prohibition."

'Political will'

Entergy spokesperson Beau Tidwell said the utility “supports exploring green microgrid technology,” but not the “area microgrids” the city wants to build. Tidwell, a former Cantrell spokesperson, also said it’s “concerning” that neither NREL nor the city “have been able to cite any examples from elsewhere in the country of such a project being safely executed in the proposed manner.”

“We also live in a hurricane-prone area, and this concept could actually slow the pace of a restoration, given its complexity and resource demands, and threaten worker safety — which is the exact opposite of resilience,” Tidwell said.

Michael Ingram, a chief engineer at NREL who worked on the New Orleans projects, said Entergy’s arguments are familiar ones.

The technology involved in the microgrids is not new, Ingram said. He also noted that it may be easier for the utility to operate the microgrids instead of the city or a third party.

Monet Brignac, communications director for City Councilmember JP Morrell, said the council has been working with the mayor’s office and others to solve the interconnection problem and is reviewing NREL’s recommendations. She declined to answer further questions.

Andreanecia Morris, head of HousingNOLA, said the microgrids are a “linchpin” of New Orleans’ future. She blamed the years of delays on city leaders, noting that the City Council has regulatory power over Entergy.

She said such delays happen “all too often” with federal grants.

“We’ve seen this movie too many times for the last 20 years,” Morris said. “Why has it taken us nine years? Lack of political will.”