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The Alliance for Affordable Energy is urging the state and utility regulators to take steps to prevent another massive outage like the one New Orleans experienced Sunday night.
The alliance’s clean grid manager, Yvonne Cappel-Vickery, says the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) should not be the ones to blame; one factor behind the outage was poor transmission planning among the utilities.
“In Mississippi on Sunday afternoon, power was selling at negative rates,” says Cappel-Vickery. “But that power was not able to get to us in Louisiana, which is a result of the utility companies not being forced to do transmission planning.”
The weather in the New Orleans area Sunday was considerably warmer than forecast; and as such, MISO was forced to order the blackouts to preserve energy.
Earlier this week, Public Service Commissioner Davante Lewis (D) blamed the DOGE cuts on the inaccurate forecasts.
Cappel-Vickery says it’s imperative that the National Weather Service be fully staffed to prevent blackouts like this.
“It is tantamount that we have adequate staffing that can do predictive modeling that are climate scientists,” says Cappel-Vickery. “And if we don’t have those people at work, we could end up with more situations such as this.”
Cappel-Vickery says accurate weather forecasting is essential for utility companies to determine how much load is necessary to meet the demand.
“They can then take that information and use it when they decide what generation needs to be dispatched and how much power we have available,” Cappel-Vickery says. “When we don’t have accurate data, we can’t have accurate modeling.”
Cappel-Vickery is also urging regulators to continue to press the issue.
“We need our regulators to not ask hard questions one time, but continue to follow up to fully understand how this happens and to deploy measures so that we don’t find ourselves in this situation again,” says Cappel-Vickery.
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