Big dickish Entergy

 That crazy spike in your bill last month? Yeah, according to Entergy, that's how it's supposed to work. 

Responding to Entergy customers who in some cases have taken to social media to blast sharp spikes in their power bills this month, utility officials said they can blame colder weather, reduced holiday travel and a longer-than-typical billing cycle.

Other factors contributing to increases include a rise in natural gas prices and power purchases Entergy made in December, the utility said. 

The utility, which provides electricity for more than 1.2 million customers and natural gas for more than 200,000 others across the New Orleans and Baton Rouge areas, was responding to a scourge of recent complaints from residents on social media about higher bills. 

Strange that Advocate article maintains Entergy's emphasis on the "y'all use too much power"  issue and doesn't elaborate very much on the "power purchases Entergy made in December." Instead it just passes on David Ellis's assertion that, "the utility shut down two of its plants for routine maintenance, which likely added between $8 and $12 to the average customer's bill."  There's a little more detail on that available from Channel 6 here. 

While the increases surprised customers when they received January’s bill in the mail, the utility did forewarn the New Orleans City Council of anticipated higher costs, in a letter dated Dec. 18.

In it, the utility writes: “ … the key driver of the variance is a $3.9 million increase in the fuel costs. Most of this increase is due to two generating plant outages, one at Grand Gulf Nuclear Station (“Grand Gulf”) and another at Union Power Station (“UPB1”). Grand Gulf entered an unplanned outage on November 6, 2020 during which necessary maintenance work was performed. Following completion of the unplanned outage, the unit entered a planned outage that ended on December 3. UPB1 took a planned outage to install a 2.0 MW emergency diesel generator, which outage lasted from October 23, 2020 to November 24, 2020."

"Unplanned outage" at the nuclear power plant (yikes!) necessitating repairs in November. Was the "planned outage" affected by or related to the unplanned one?  Also, how often does this happen?  Pretty often, apparently.

Logan Burke, executive director of the Alliance for Affordable Energy, said the causes of these spikes are multi-faceted. She said there is a two-month lag for fuel adjustment charges, so any increase in usage from the holidays and the colder weather between Thanksgiving and Christmas will be seen now.

However, there were two Entergy power plants that went down in November. The Grand Gulf Nuclear Station in Mississippi and the Union Power Station in Arkansas both suffered outages.

Why does this matter?

When those power plants go down, Entergy customers still pay for power from those plants and for whatever additional power Entergy had to buy on the energy market to compensate for their plant outages. The Grand Gulf plant, in particular, has had many problems in recent years.

“Grand Gulf has been having difficulties since 2016,” Burke said. “Every time it goes down, we (the customers) have to pay for it.”

In 2019, The Lens asked about the ongoing problems at Grand Gulf which happened at the time to be, "the least reliable nuclear generator in the US, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry trade group."  They also asked Entergy about its management of the "planned" outages and their effect on people's bills. 

The Lens sent the company a list of questions to the company about reliability problems at the plant. In response, spokesperson Neal Kirby provided a brief written statement that only addressed the planned 2020 outage, but wrote that he could not reveal how long it will be. 

“The 2020 outage at Entergy’s Grand Gulf Nuclear Station is planned for refueling and maintenance at the plant,” Kirby wrote in an email. “We time these refueling outages when other generators and market purchases can be available to supply power economically to our customers. It is not appropriate to discuss the timing or length of outages because that is market sensitive business information.” 

No matter how long it is, the outage could be expensive for New Orleans residents. According to Entergy, outages at Grand Gulf can cost New Orleans customers upwards of $100,000 a day. In a letter to Councilwoman and utility chair Helena Moreno, Entergy New Orleans CEO David Ellis revealed that an eight day outage in December 2018 cost residents $1.15 million.

Notice that the company's response claims that planned outages are timed not to overlap (but also the timing is none of your business because of "market sensitive information" matters.) And yet here we are looking at bills inflated at least in part because of overlapping plant outages which Entergy claims (and the Advocate uncritically reports) to be "routine maintenance." 

The company pulled two power plants offline this winter for routine maintenance, which meant it had to purchase power on the open market as well. Natural gas costs rose by 12%, and a bill credit related to a 2017 corporate restructuring expired.

In any case, the ratepayers have to cover the cost of those plants whether they are buying power from them that month or not.  Sounds like a raw deal baked into the city's agreement with the utility. The good news is, as the regulatory body managing Entergy's monopoly, the City Council still has a few things it can do to provide relief.  For example it can direct Entergy to maintain the COVID emergency  moratorium on shut offs for overdue bills which it did this week.

It can also push them to implement more customer friendly policies such as the billing "heads-up" CM Moreno suggests here.

Before the vote, Moreno and Joe Giarrusso also urged Entergy to create programs to alert customers in real time about their power use.

Though that function was a promised capability of the advanced meters, Guillot said Entergy won't have it ready for another six months. 

Telling people 10 or so days into their billing cycle that they are using more power than normal will make higher bills less of a surprise or could prompt people to dial down their use if needed, Moreno said.

"There’s got to be some type of trigger to let customers know, over the phone or over email or whatever, so that habits can be changed," she said.

Although, frankly, that just reinforces Entergy's premise that it's really more the ratepayers than the company who are responsible for the high bills. In fact, it seems like they're already building on that narrative this week ahead of an expected change in the weather.  

At a recent council meeting to discuss Entergy customer bills that had doubled and in some cases tripled in January, council members asked if Entergy could provide notice if it saw conditions that were increasing usage - and bills.

Wednesday the company sent out a news release to advise customers of just that.

"Entergy’s Louisiana utilities are encouraging customers to prepare for cold weather and increased energy usage as portions of Louisiana could see low or freezing temperatures into the weekend and next week," said the statement in part.

Entergy also advised that heat usage can be up to 50 percent of a customer's bill during cold weather. The utility company advises people to set their thermostat lower, look for leaks and to reverse ceiling fans to push warm air down.  

Again, the problem is, "y'all use too much power." So turn down your thermostat and stop asking for "market sensitive business information" about whether or not that nuclear plant you are paying for is broken again. It's really not your place to know more than that.