The Entergy - SWB partnership is going well…

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After a new power complex for New Orleans’ drainage system recently failed its first major test, Sewerage & Water Board officials said Tuesday they will rely on backup power to keep the city’s streets dry during major storms, a dramatic turn after S&WB for years touted the complex as the solution to perennial power failures. Two new in-house turbines will run the city’s pumps during big storms, S&WB officials told City Council members on Tuesday, while conceding that a $300 million, Entergy-powered new complex can shut down at any time during normal electricity disruptions.

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Right now, it’s possible there could be a voltage sag that would be below (the current settings), and that’s what we want to mitigate the risk of by using backup turbines at this point,” S&WB General Superintendent Kaitlin Tymrak said in an interview after the meeting. S&WB officials discussed their new plans with Entergy leaders at their side on Tuesday, a rare joint presentation intended to get to the bottom of how the power system could have failed after Entergy and the S&WB worked together to engineer it in response to catastrophic flooding in 2017.

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S&WB officials told council members that the power complex equipment is designed to operate at 90%-110% of normal voltage levels, and that manufacturer settings force it to shut down automatically when substation voltage drops below 80% to prevent damage. S&WB officials have since dropped the settings to 70%, which would have kept the equipment running during Arthur. But “voltage sags” below 70% are fairly common, according to national standards published on Entergy’s website. And voltage sags can happen for any number of reasons, even when there’s no severe weather. A previous voltage sag of 40% – the cause of which wasn’t fully explained on Tuesday – forced the S&WB equipment trip offline on May 20, a day with little to no rainfall. According to the national standards published by Entergy, 40% of sags are below 70% of normal voltage, and 16% are below 40%. S&WB officials said they are working with an engineering consultant and the equipment manufacturer to determine if the settings can go below 70%, but Executive Director Randy Hayman said he’s not sure the required settings will be able to accommodate every voltage sag. “I don’t know if we’ll ever have a system that’s 100%,” Hayman said. Entergy officials suggested that any trip settings are problematic. “Any setting that instantly shuts down the power complex on the voltage side may not be the best configuration,” Williams, the Entergy vice president, said.

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When McCarron asked if Entergy had provided S&WB with voltage standards prior to construction, Entergy officials replied that the information is on the company’s website. “It is made available to all customers, and we were never asked to have a meeting about that in particular,” Entergy New Orleans CEO Deanna Rodriguez said.

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