Status of the Electric Infrastructure due to Hurricane Gustav

As of 5 a.m. this morning, electrical power outages from Gustav had reached more than 825,000 throughout the Entergy service territory, as outages continue occurring in Mississippi and north Louisiana. This is the second largest outage in company history, behind only Hurricane Katrina.

Entergy’s transmission system has sustained massive damage, with 191 transmission lines and 210 substations out of service.

The New Orleans and Baton Rouge area remains essentially an island, no longer electrically connected to the rest of the system. Waterford 1, Nine Mile Point and Little Gypsy are now supplying all power to this area because all transmission lines leading to and from the area are out of service.

Entergy’s Waterford 3 Nuclear Plant near New Orleans completed a controlled shutdown on Sunday night at approximately 8:30 p.m. in anticipation of the heavy winds that are forecast for Monday morning, with the plant taken off line at 10:30 p.m.

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Comments

Anonymous said…

What will a hurricane do to hundreds of windmills, or to a vastly extended transmission grid built to transmit piddly amounts of power from 25 percent capacity factor wind farms?

September 2, 2008 at 3:17 PM

Anonymous said…

Since windmills are clean, green, renewable, and the green answer to replacing nuclear power, then obviously - they'll just grow back by themselves!

I can't imagine windmills would require (gasp) fossil fuels to scour the countryside for scattered pieces, put them together again, or worse, have to replace them ...

September 3, 2008 at 12:33 PM

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