Entergy Continues to Make Progress on Grid Restoration

Our friends at Entergy are getting some well-deserved attention for getting the power back on in Louisiana. Yesterday we told you that Entergy had already restored power to portions of New Orleans, and today, the heroic efforts of the company and its employees were the subject of a story in USA Today:

[D]espite the obstacles, Entergy, the USA's No. 3 electric utility, has, by most accounts, exceeded expectations by restoring power in just about a week to most of the 1.1 million homes and businesses that lost it.

As of late Tuesday, the company had fixed about 647,000 outages in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. About 409,000 customers in Louisiana, most in the New Orleans area, and 35,000 in Mississippi were still in the dark.

"The spirit of employees has been very high because we've gotten to so many customers so fast," Helmick says, noting the outages are, by far, the most extensive in company history.

And here's more good news: Entergy is getting ready to restart the Waterford nuclear plant, which had been shut down before Katrina struck the Gulf Coast. As the article notes, any restart must be approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Technorati tags: Nuclear Energy Environment Energy Politics Technology Economics Nuclear Regulatory Commission Hurricane Katrina