MISO addresses New Orleans outage, defends decision

(The Center Square) − The Midcontinent Independent System Operator issued a formal statement Tuesday following a presentation to the New Orleans City Council, defending its decision to order a load shed that left nearly 100,000 southeast Louisiana residents without power on May 25.

Appearing before the Council's utility committee, MISO executives said the emergency outage − known as a load shed − was a last-resort action to prevent a wider collapse of the electric grid. The regional transmission organization that connects 15 states and the Canadian province of Manitoba pointed to a convergence of issues: Higher-than-expected electricity demand, two nuclear plants offline in Entergy's system, and tornado damage to a key transmission line.

"We understand the actions we took were highly disruptive," said Todd Hillman, MISO's senior vice president of external affairs. "But they were absolutely necessary to protect the overall stability of the power grid."MISO emphasized that while there was enough power available across the broader region, a lack of transmission capacity into Louisiana created a bottleneck. 

Under federal reliability rules, MISO was required to act before transmission lines became dangerously overloaded.The statement and testimony have renewed calls for Louisiana regulators to push for long-term regional transmission planning — an effort that has stalled for years. Without it, experts say Louisiana remains vulnerable to future outages.MISO pledged to review the incident and said it would work with local utilities and regulators to identify improvements. 

However, decisions about where power is cut during load shedding events should be made by local utilities like Entergy, not MISO — a point councilmembers said they plan to investigate further.