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.

"Beyond punishment"

Jason Williams was sworn in as DA today. We are, as always, prepared to be disappointed in how he actually plans to translate his rhetoric into practice.  But he does know the rhetoric well. 

Williams says he will end the use of Louisiana’s stringent habitual offender laws, never transfer juveniles to adult court and become much pickier about charging cases for prosecution. Underscoring his new approach, his large transition team includes many liberal policy advocates and former colleagues in the defense bar.

"Being more selective about prosecutions will allow us to focus on the crimes that matter most to all of us. We’ve got to go beyond punishment and invest in our community," Williams said in his inauguration speech.

Again, we'll see if those words carry any sort of commitment. We already expect the increase in crime commensurate with worsening economic conditions during the pandemic will lead to new political pressures on every politician to "get tough." That's especially likely to be worse during a municipal election year. 

Speaking of which, the timing of Jason's resignation from City Council means there will not be an additional election just to fill his seat. 

Monday also brought some clarity regarding Williams’ now vacant at-large seat on the City Council. Tyronne Walker, Williams former campaign manager and transition director, said that his resignation of the seat was effective Monday at 11 a.m., meaning his seat will be filled by an appointment by members of the City Council. If he had decided to resign any earlier, there would have been more than a year left in his term. Under city law, that means the seat would have been required to be filled by a special election.

On Monday morning about an hour before the ceremony began, Walker told The Lens that Williams had not recommended an interim candidate for the council to consider. Council President Helena Moreno on Monday announced the opening of applications for the post.

So.. you know.. if you're looking for a job...

Nobody wants this big pile of money

Last week, City Council passed a non-binding resolution instructing the Criminal District Court to stop collecting conviction and bail fees from defendants and to return money to people from whom they've already collected these fees.  Supposedly, the idea is to discourage the courts from hoovering up unnecessary money from the poor and indigent who make up the vast majority of people wrung through our brutal criminal justice system. But there are problems.

To begin with, at least some of these fees (the bail fees) are mandated by state law which supersedes the council's authority so at least some of this money has to be collected. The courts are already in a state of limbo regarding that money since a different state law passed this year instructs them to hand it over to the city.  The new law is intended to eliminate a perverse incentive whereby the courts use these fees to fund their own operations. As a result of a 2018 lawsuit ruling that forbids the judges from keeping the funds, they've been collecting in a separate escrow account. 

Anyway that's as good a job as I can do summarizing the Lens's article.  The point is, because we haven't yet managed to ban cash bail altogether, there is a tub full of money that the courts aren't allowed to keep but the city council asserts that it does not want.  

OR maybe they do want it. 

At a City Council Criminal Justice Committee meeting last week, prior to the passage of the resolution, Councilwoman Helena Moreno wondered what would happen with the money judges do not have discretion over collecting. 

“So let’s say that the judges say, OK, the city isn’t going to collect, so it’s not worth imposing some of these additional fines and fees,” Moreno said. “But for those that through state law — statutorily — they have to, and it ends up in the escrow account, what do we do with the money in the escrow account?”

Will Snowden, executive director of the Vera Institute of Justice’s New Orleans office, said that money from mandatory fees would go to the city, as is prescribed by state law. 

“This resolution can’t address those mandatory fines that the judges are required to assess on an individual. I know specifically, the bail fee is not something they have discretion in not imposing. That’s a fee that is assigned to every bail that is already set. So my understanding is those funds going into the escrow account — those bail fees — that escrow account will go on to the city as it is currently prescribed.”

“So then it would be up to [the annual city budget passed by the council] on how we use the escrow account, is that right?” Moreno asked.

The subsequent discussion between Moreno and Kristin Palmer there suggests the council could return the money to individuals themselves.  Something tells me that's going to be more easily said than done. 

Something else tells me, it won't be what they choose anyway.

They did have the option of voting no

Tons of fun watching City Council completely throw up its hands last week at the prospect of having to vote for the STR tax.  There were objections from the public comment but those were met with typical condescension from our elected friends about how poorly the public supposedly understands the background details.

But that's bullshit.  New Orleanians have been following this story for the better part of the past two years that it has dominated the local political news. We know what it is and why it does what it does. The deal was bad enough even for "normal" times. It offered insufficient and mostly one time funding to shore up failing city infrastructure in exchange for authorizing permanent publicly funded slush funds for the convention center and for a private tourism promotion board called New Orleans and Company.  

The STR tax is only one piece of the deal authorized by the state legislature and then by local ballot measure. It has been criticized for two reasons. The first reason is it creates a perverse incentive for the city to promote the proliferation of short term rentals despite their destructive impact on New Orleans neighborhoods and housing costs. Residents have spent several years now fighting to rein in the STR boom but political leadership has repeatedly demonstrated its indifference. Recently, the former executive director of Sonder, one of the largest and most damaging purveyors of STRs was hired by the Cantrell administration and put in charge of city permitting and land use policy; a shocking development for the thousands of New Orleanians now threatened with the prospect of eviction. 

The second criticism of the tax is that it hands millions of dollars over to a private non-profit tourism promotion agency so that it can produce dogshit tweets like this. These were the complaints presented to City Council last week.  Members responded by shrugging and talking down to people about the "ballot language."

“This council was also not involved in the negotiation of the fair share deal when this was broken down,” Councilwoman Kristin Palmer, one of the council’s most vocal opponents of short-term rental expansion, said on Thursday. “The ballot language was what was passed by the voters, we have to adhere to that ballot language, and that’s why we’re here today. And I’m referring, of course, to the 25 percent of the tax that is to be given to New Orleans and Company.”

The ballot initiative approved by voters last year gave the Council the ability to levy a new short-term rental tax. But it didn’t require them to. And while the City Council couldn’t create the new tax unilaterally, it can create new fees for city permits and licenses, like short-term rental licenses. Prior to the fair share deal, council members had floated a fee structure on short-term rentals that would have raised an estimated $20 million for affordable housing projects.

They didn't actually have to vote for it.  Since the time that the Fair Sham deal and the ballot language of some of its component parts was finalized,  many things have changed. New Orleans is going to be hit harder than most places by the pandemic/depression/mass eviction crisis we are dealing with now.  City Council had an opportunity to at least try and force a reconsideration of the bad deal which had become far worse. Instead they chose to pretend it was out of their hands.