The Advocate. October 18, 2022.
Editorial: Hardening the electric grid is like remodeling a house. Can we afford it now?
There were a lot of similarities between Ida and Ian, the marquee storms of the 2021 and 2022 hurricane seasons.
Each was the ninth storm of its season. Each was nourished by the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico and registered as a Category 4 on the Saffir-Simpson scale. Each tore up the electrical grid at landfall, leaving millions of homes in the dark.
But there was a meaningful difference between Ida, which assaulted Louisiana last year, and Ian, which blew through Florida last month: Florida utilities were quicker to restore power than their counterparts in Louisiana.
Ida knocked out power to about a million customers in Louisiana. Ian impacted nearly three times as many customers after tearing through some of the most densely populated parts of Florida, the nation’s third-largest state.
But Florida’s utilities recovered more quickly, so that four days after Ian, the number of customers without power in Florida was roughly the same as in Louisiana four days after Ida. Florida utilities were also quicker to restore power in the hardest hit counties, Lee and Collier, compared with Louisiana’s most impacted parishes, Terrebonne and Lafourche.
None of that should be surprising, since Florida utilities have spent years making major investments securing their electric grids against storm damage. The effort began after a series of hurricanes impacted the state in 2004 and 2005.
The keys to a more secure electric grid are not a secret. They include stronger power poles, underground transmission lines and elevated substations.
All of that costs money, and the bodies that regulate utility rates — typically a state agency but in the case of New Orleans, the City Council — ensure that the utilities can charge ratepayers for the improvements.
Indeed, Florida’s electric utilities charge higher retail rates than Louisiana — about a third higher according to 2020 figures from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
In fact, Louisiana has among the lowest retail electric rates in the country, though customers may not feel like they are seeing the benefit right now, because of high natural gas prices and hot summer weather.
In Louisiana, electric utilities are mostly regulated by the state Public Service Commission, and panel member Craig Greene, a Baton Rouge Republican, has hired a consulting firm to examine ways to improve the reliability of the electric grid. Entergy Louisiana, the state’s largest utility, is also working on a plan.
Greene said Florida “sticks out as a success story,” and the Sunshine State’s improvements, while costly, may have saved money on rebuilding electric lines.
There may soon be an additional source of money to beef up the local electric grid, because the climate change legislation approved by Congress in August envisions spending hundreds of billions on improvements to electric lines. Democrats and Republicans can debate whether it makes sense for the federal government, groaning under $31 trillion in debt and struggling to tame inflation, to spend billions on investments that have in the past been handled by private enterprise.
But the money is there for the taking and should be allocated to help poor states with high vulnerability, like Louisiana.
Ultimately, though, the cost of improving the reliability of our power structure will fall on customers.
Hardening the electric grid is a lot like renovating a house. You can have as many coats of paint as you want, or as many as you can afford.
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