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by Gaby Flores
On August 29th, Hurricane Ida made landfall. In its wake, Ida left more than 1 million Louisiana residents without electricity. Immediately following the event, Entergy - one of the major utilities in Louisiana - stated that “based on historical restoration times, customers in the direct path of a storm as intense as Hurricane Ida could experience outages for more than three weeks. While 90 percent of customers will be restored sooner, customers in the hardest-hit areas should plan for the possibility of experiencing extended power outages.”
While Entergy has restored power more quickly than may have originally been anticipated, bringing power back to approximately 70% of their New Orleans customers within a week, there is still much work to be done. As of September 8th, 302,000 of Entergy’s customers are without power (RTO Insider), and it may be the end of the month before some of them, particularly those in the Bayou areas, have their power restored.
To quantify the real impact that Ida had on transmission lines, Yes Energy’s data tells an interesting story. Let’s look at a timeline of active outages in Louisiana preceding and following the storm:
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Saturday, August 28th - 486
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Sunday, August 29th - 1,504
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Monday, August 30th - 1,655
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Tuesday, August 31st - 2,006
Due to these extensive outages, MISO pricing in Louisiana was not particularly volatile - there was just no power. However, unless you work for a transmission or utility company in the area, there is no real way to know when specific outages will be resolved. As power is restored, potential grid imbalances may lead to some interesting pricing dynamics, and possibly volatility. Using real-time generation data from Live Power, we can see when generators come back online from their outages, as well as which generators are exacerbating or alleviating congestion due to the outages in the area.
Figure: Here we can see congestion on the way to New Orleans as restoration efforts are underway but not able to accept typical power flow levels. Insight into the generator response to this congestion comes from Live Power.
Monitoring the restoration efforts provides insights into market dynamics, including the supply stack, load recovery, topology changes to power flows, and the associated impacts. As extreme weather events continue to become more prevalent, immediate detection of changing conditions becomes an ever increasing necessity for nodal market participants.
Yes Energy provides the extensive data and solutions needed to closely monitor the markets during and following extreme weather events such as Hurricane Ida. Our nodal pricing, congestion, constraint, and outage data, alongside data from our strategic partners, Live Power and IIR Energy, delivers the most complete picture of what’s occurring in the markets in real-time, so you can make the best trading and operational decisions possible.
Learn more about our strategic and data partners!
