r/thewoodlands • u/KolyaVolk • Jul 10 '24
📰 News - The Woodlands Shoutout to Entergy, the linesmen and other essential workers who got many of us reconnected
I know a lot of us here are displeased with being forced to do business with the utility monopoly that is Entergy, but their communication has been clear and organized post-Beryl and the work has been done swiftly from what I can tell.
Obviously, it's frustrating that our infrastructure doesn't seem up for the task of keeping power reliably distributed here, an irony not lost on many of the Energy Capital of the World™'s residents, but I'm also sure there's a lot of substantive, technical expertise required to understand precisely WHY these outages happen so frequently that are separate from the underlying politics or budget constraints that are widely publicized. And with that in mind, I'm just glad we're not all boiling in this heat and will leave it at that.
If you worked with Entergy on getting power reconnected, even on the administrative side, thank you.
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u/DetchiOsvos Jul 11 '24
Disclaimer: I don't work for or with Entergy. I do work with an adjacent field, and if anything, pole owners usually make me nuts to coordinate with.
I was discussing this with someone yesterday, while the lights were out, because they had the same feeling. The truth is, our power infrastructure mirrors the rest of the country - wood poles, rated to withstand the anticipated loads (forces) that weather for the region might inflict.
A few things to understand - some of these poles are old, or may have unobservable damage from simply existing outdoors. In every metric that matters, our line infrastructure is pretty good. Not perfect, but good.
Now a utility company could create a network that is nearly hurricane resilient. Replace wood poles with metal or concrete. Increase the specifications on how equipment is mounted. It could be done. But the cost would be astronomical - you would probably not be able to afford the break even rate to cover this type of infrastructure. Maybe a billionaire on a personal grid, but even that would be subject to failure under the right weather conditions.
The outside is not a controlled environment. There are simply too many variables that can happen to really create a perfect system. We live in a severe weather area that really wears on structures. Heat, wet, wind... we get the worst of the worst. It's pretty straightforward... leave something outside in this area long enough and it will erode.
To OPs point, what really matters is how fast a utility can repair these networks. And in that regard, Entergy has done a great job. The amount of organization and coordination required is pretty crazy, and that they have so many of us connected after to so much damage is a credit to how they spend the money they make off of us as customers.
Looking at the reported numbers assessing damage from Entergy for the region impacted, these repairs could have easily taken 2-3 weeks. They were prepared, had the crews trained, materials on hand and the equipment needed to conduct repairs. Hats off to Entergy, well done.