Why your power keeps going out 3x longer than Florida
On a normal day, with no hurricane anywhere near us, the average Louisiana home loses about three times as many minutes of power as the average Florida home. And Florida gets hit by more hurricanes than we do.
Statewide averages, major storm days excluded · EIA Form 861, 2023–2024
That's not weather. That's a Public Service Commission that never did its job.
Chris Justin · licensed professional engineer · former consultant to this Commission
Same Gulf. Same storms. Different regulator.
Every outage number on this page excludes major storm days. That's the point. This is normal-day failure: the pole that finally leans over on a sunny afternoon, the line a limb has been resting on for three years, the equipment that aged out years ago and never got replaced.
And it's not the linemen. Those crews work storms until they drop, and they fix what they're sent to fix. The failure is in what they're never sent to fix, year after year, because nobody makes the company do the boring upkeep that keeps a grid standing.
Louisiana has ranked at or near the bottom of the country for power reliability every single year, and it's been getting worse: the state's own Legislative Auditor found outage duration up 50% from 2013 to 2023, even with hurricanes excluded.
A grid this bad, for this long, is not bad luck. Here's the record.
They wrote the rules to fix this. Then they threw them in the dust bin.
Nobody made the Commission investigate its own grid. One of its own did. Commissioner Craig Greene, a Republican, opened a docket on decaying poles back in 2019, after years of constituent complaints about rotting poles and old wires left hanging. After Hurricane Ida, he opened two more: one to force real maintenance and hardening standards on every utility, and one to answer the question every ratepayer was asking: could better maintenance have avoided the storm costs we all paid for? Nobody opposed him.
A Republican commissioner, on the record
“Right now, nobody can tell me that Entergy properly maintained the grid before the storm hit such that their infrastructure even stood a chance of standing up during the storms.”
Commissioner Craig Greene, December 2022, in The Advocate
The Commission's own consultant delivered the answer in December 2023: thirteen sections of findings and recommendations. Here is what they found, in a state that bills you every month for grid upkeep:
- Not one utility in Louisiana had done a detailed pole study in the prior three years. Not Entergy, not Cleco, not anyone who answered. The poles holding up your power had not been seriously studied since before Ida. Staff Report, Dockets R-36226 / R-35394, December 8, 2023
- No utility had any system for prioritizing the removal of abandoned, rotting poles. Staff's own words: “there does not appear to exist any current system in place for any Louisiana electric utility to prioritize the removal of abandoned, decaying, aged and damaged poles.” The dead poles you drive past every day aren't a backlog being worked. There was no list. Staff Report, December 8, 2023
- Zero fines in 25 years of reliability standards. Staff wrote it was “unaware of any instance, until this year,” in which a Louisiana electric utility had been fined for failing to meet the minimum reliability standards on the books since the 1990s. A rule nobody enforces is not a rule. It's a suggestion. Staff Report, December 8, 2023
The Commission adopted none of it. They didn't even vote. At the August 20, 2025 meeting, a commissioner asked staff to move old dockets “into the dust bin,” saying “we want to remove red tape.” Nine days later, a staff letter closed the pole docket and the grid-maintenance docket as “stale.” Six years of investigation, ended by a letter.
The third docket never even got that far. A finished, industry-wide grid-resilience rule was filed in it in August 2023, set for the September agenda, and never taken up. It has been sitting there ever since, marked “deferred.” Even the measuring stick is dead: Louisiana's reliability standards date to 1998, and the docket opened to modernize them has produced a $97,500 consultant and no rule.
Why were the rules never adopted? The Commission's own top lawyer said it out loud:
The Commission's executive counsel, on the record
“That docket has a final recommendation from Staff in the docket that has never been voted on by the Commission... there was a lot of comments filed by stakeholders, utilities, pole attachers, and the like that had issues with the rules, mainly that they were extremely onerous on the utilities and the attachers.”
Executive Counsel Kathryn Bowman, August 20, 2025 meeting
The rules that would keep your lights on were never voted on because the utilities said they were too hard on the utilities.
Entergy, to its own investors
The rulemakings, which proposed “new reliability metrics” and “new penalties and incentives for reliability performance,” “were formally closed in August 2025 without the adoption of any rules or obligations being promulgated by the LPSC.”
Entergy Corporation, FY2025 annual report (Form 10-K), filed with the SEC
The “onerous” rules, item by item. Decide for yourself.
These are the standards the utilities killed by calling them too burdensome. Read them. Then remember who they were too burdensome for.
Entergy earns a guaranteed 9.7% on everything it builds and nothing on maintenance. For a company built on that math, a standard without a financial consequence is a suggestion. So the rules came in two parts: the standards, and the money that makes them real.
The standards
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Inspect the grid on a schedule.
Louisiana has no required inspection interval at all; each utility polices itself. Staff recommended full system inspections at least every 5 years. Florida has required pole inspections every 8 years since the 2004–05 hurricanes, and it's a big part of why their grid beats ours on normal days. Louisiana's rule: never adopted.
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Inspect the whole pole, not just the bottom of it.
The traditional method is a hammer and a boring tool at the base, as high as the inspector can reach. The top of the pole and the crossarms never get looked at. The rule would require drones for pole tops, because utilities that tried them found substantially more rot than ground inspection was catching. Never adopted.
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Show the maintenance plan before the work, not after.
Every utility would file its inspection and maintenance program each November 30, for Commission review before the next year's work, with maps of where the work happens, the budget, and budgeted-versus-actually-spent maintenance dollars for the prior three years. Never adopted, so those filings don't happen.
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Count every bad pole and fix it on a clock.
An ongoing inventory of every pole needing repair or replacement, worked off on a 3, 6, or 9 month priority schedule based on public safety. Staff found no utility had any such system.
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Hard deadlines on dead poles.
Written removal commitments within 3 months. Every abandoned pole and structure in the state gone within 2 years. Never adopted. The dead poles are still standing.
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Vegetation money with a refund attached.
Annual tree-trimming plans with parish-level maps and budgets, plus a yearly true-up with refunds on the table for budgeted vegetation money the utility didn't spend. Staff's words: “There should be no reduction of vegetation management services just to increase the profits of shareholders.”
The Commission did act on vegetation this February. It adopted the spending half and shelved the accountability half: a new bill rider to recover extra vegetation spending went from directive to final rules in about four months, while the refund rule for the vegetation money you already pay has sat unvoted since 2023.
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Standards for how the work is done, not just how much of it.
Customers keep raising the same complaints: crews on private property with no notice, mature trees cut to stumps during pole work, herbicide sprayed along roads and yards with nobody told. The new vegetation pilot measures exactly two things, dollars spent and circuit miles trimmed, and says nothing about methods, herbicide, or notifying the property owner before crews show up. I'd add the missing rules: advance notice to residents, written justification before removing or aggressively cutting mature trees, and rules on herbicide application. It's your property. Somebody should have to tell you before they spray it.
The consequences that make standards real
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Tie storm cost recovery to the maintenance record.
After every major storm: a Lessons Learned Report within 4 months, with parish-level maps of the previous 5 years of inspections, maintenance, and money invested in exactly the areas that failed, “utilized by the Commission while evaluating the reasonableness of storm cost recovery.” A utility asking you to pay for a storm rebuild would first have to show its maintenance record where the grid fell down. Deferred maintenance would stop being free. Never adopted.
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Enforce the minimums that already exist.
Louisiana has had minimum reliability standards with fines attached since 1998. Staff wrote in 2023 that it was “unaware of any instance, until this year,” of a utility being fined or facing financial consequences in the entire 25 years. The exception proves money works: under a 2021 settlement with automatic customer credits, Entergy missed its 2022 outage targets and credited customers $6,004,668. Money moves them. Letters don't.
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Prove they spent our maintenance money, or give it back.
You pay for maintenance in your rates every month. No mechanism makes the utility prove it spent what it collected, and no refund exists when it doesn't. Staff proposed that mechanism for vegetation budgets. I'd extend it to the whole maintenance budget.
The capstone rule
A finished storm-resilience rule has been sitting in a third docket since 2023. It would force every utility “resilience” plan to prove the spending goes “above and beyond” the routine replacement work customers already fund, and to price cheaper alternatives like microgrids and batteries, before approval. It has never been brought to a vote. Entergy's $1.9 billion plan was approved without it, and the Commission's own engineering consultant flagged in writing that the plan was missing exactly those elements.
Between the three dockets, not one standard of either kind was ever adopted.
While the rules sat unadopted
They funded the capital and killed the oversight.
While the maintenance standards sat on the shelf, the same Commission approved billions of dollars in new grid construction, on your bill, at a guaranteed 9.7% return. Follow the dates. They tell the story on their own.
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September 11, 2019
Commissioner Craig Greene, a Republican, opens the pole docket after years of constituent complaints about decaying poles and old wires left hanging.
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November 17, 2021
After Ida, Greene opens two more dockets: real maintenance and hardening standards for every utility, and an investigation into whether better maintenance could have avoided the storm costs. Nobody opposes him.
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August 30, 2023
A finished, industry-wide grid-resilience rule is filed, set for the September agenda. It is never taken up. It is still sitting there.
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December 8, 2023
The consultant's report lands: thirteen sections of standards and consequences, the ledger you just read. Comments close January 2024. None of it is ever adopted.
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April 19, 2024
Entergy's $1.9 billion hardening plan is approved, 3 to 2, four days after the final framework was filed. Filed Monday, added to the agenda Wednesday, approved Friday. It comes with a new rider on every Entergy Louisiana bill, and Entergy earns its guaranteed 9.7% on every dollar of it.
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December 30, 2024
Cleco files its own hardening plan eight months after Entergy's approval. Built on a study by the same consulting firm that did Entergy's; Cleco's own witness would later tell the Commission they “performed the analysis for Entergy. Same study, very similar type request.”
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August 29, 2025
The pole docket and the maintenance docket are closed as “stale.” By staff letter. No vote. Sixteen months after the $1.9 billion was approved, the standards that would have made anyone prove the maintenance was done went in the dust bin.
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November 19, 2025
Cleco's plan is approved unanimously: about $200 million of pole work. The settlement mirrors Entergy's framework term for term. Cleco was approved because of the Entergy precedent. That's what a precedent is. They did add a pole performance fee, which is something. But with the standards dockets dead, the rest of the oversight is Cleco grading its own homework: quarterly reports, filed by Cleco, about Cleco.
Two rounds of ratepayer-funded capital, approved on the utilities' own studies and the utilities' own paperwork, while the rules that would have measured the work sat in the dust bin. That's the trade this Commission made.
The rush, in a commissioner's own words
“Entergy filed this framework on Monday, it was added to the supplemental agenda on Wednesday, and here it is Friday at 12:10... There is no justification I have seen why this has to be taken up this month, this week. The only thing that I have seen... is that Entergy has an earnings call on April 23rd.”
Commissioner Davante Lewis, April 19, 2024, voting no on the $1.9 billion
Four days from filing to approval, in time for an earnings call. The reliability rules waited six years and never got a vote at all. That's who this Commission moves fast for, and who it doesn't.
What's actually in the “resilience” filing
Their own engineers screened Entergy's filing. About 8% is purely new protection.
The Commission hired its own engineering firm to review what Entergy filed. They went through all 9,611 proposed projects, about $8.85 billion worth, and asked one question: which of these exist only to make the grid stronger, and which are just replacing old equipment that was going to need replacing anyway?
The Commission's own consultant, in the filing
Many of the other project types “blend upgrades designed to increase grid resilience with routine capital replacement and upgrades that are needed due to deferred capital replacement” and “would therefore likely be included in any capital improvement plan” Entergy proposed.
Independent Engineering Consultant Report, LPSC Docket U-36625, August 2023, p. 50
“Deferred capital replacement” is the polite version. The plain version: Entergy ran its equipment past its useful life, and the catch-up is now bundled into a resilience plan with its own new line on your bill. Routine replacement is supposed to wait on the ordinary once-a-year rate process before it starts billing; the resilience rider resets every six months, so the same work starts earning Entergy its 9.7% months sooner. The Commission's own consultant called rider treatment what it is: “more timely cost recovery.” Work they were going to have to do anyway, rebranded as storm protection, on a faster payback.
Some of the hardening is real, and I'll say so as an engineer: a pole rated for stronger wind beats a well-maintained old one. And the genuinely new protection, the undergrounding, the substation flood mitigation, the control-house hardening, is exactly what passed the screen. That's the 8%. Nobody has ever been made to draw that line through the rest of the filing.
The data that would settle it
Nobody can draw that line, and the reason is on the record. When the Commission's own pole docket asked Entergy for the asset data that would let anyone separate the routine catch-up from the real hardening, its consultant reported the answer: “ELL has not responded to discovery.” Entergy sat on the data. Then the Commission closed the docket that asked for it.
So: the utility didn't hand over the data, the regulator closed the docket requesting it, and the bill went out anyway. You're not allowed to know how much of the “resilience” charge on your bill is just deferred replacement of equipment your maintenance payments were supposed to keep alive.
There is always a next filing.
I read these dockets so you don't have to, and I'll tell you what's buried in the next one, in plain language, before the vote.
Keep me postedSkipping maintenance doesn't make a pole cheaper. It makes it fail sooner.
None of this is a mystery, and none of it requires anyone at Entergy to be a villain. It's arithmetic. Maintenance is an operating expense: the utility earns nothing on it. New construction is capital: the utility earns a guaranteed 9.7% return on it, every year, for the life of the asset. Every dollar of upkeep is pure cost to them. Every dollar of rebuild is profit. Economists put a name on this in 1962. The incentive runs one direction, and it's been running for decades.
A wood pole is designed to last about 40 years, and the inspections and treatment that get it there are exactly the kind of cheap upkeep a utility earns nothing on. Skip them and the pole doesn't get cheaper. It fails sooner, and more poles fail, and every replacement goes on your bill at 9.7%. Louisiana doesn't even require pole inspections on a schedule: California requires them every 5 years, Florida every 8, Louisiana never. Entergy has told an industry conference it averaged 15 years.
The Commission could check any of this. Here's what it actually checks:
| Building (capital) | Maintenance (upkeep) | |
|---|---|---|
| Audited? | Yes. Estimated vs. actual, trued up annually. | No. No true-up exists. Nothing checks the work was done. |
| If they underspend | They give it back, with interest. | They keep it, as long as total earnings stay inside the band. |
| Do they profit on it? | 9.70%, guaranteed. | Nothing. Pure cost. |
Building (capital)
- Audited? Yes. Estimated vs. actual, trued up annually.
- If they underspend: they give it back, with interest.
- Do they profit on it? 9.70%, guaranteed.
Maintenance (upkeep)
- Audited? No. No true-up exists. Nothing checks the work was done.
- If they underspend: they keep it, as long as total earnings stay inside the band.
- Do they profit on it? Nothing. Pure cost.
And you can watch the incentive work in Entergy's own filings. Their 2023 rate case put a number on distribution maintenance, in their own cost study. Two years later, they were spending a different one:
Distribution maintenance, per year, in Entergy Louisiana's own 2023 rate filing
What it actually spent two years later
Nothing in the rules asks where the difference went, because no rule exists to ask. The formula plan tests total earnings, not whether the maintenance money in your rates bought any maintenance.
The pattern is old. In the five years before Ida, Entergy Louisiana spent about $44 per customer per year maintaining its distribution grid. Florida Power & Light spent more than twice that. Alabama Power, on the same Gulf, nearly three times. Then the storm comes, and for-profit utilities aren't eligible for FEMA disaster aid. The member-owned co-op down the road gets 70 to 90 percent of its storm costs covered by FEMA. Entergy can't get that, so it bills you instead. That's the storm charge, roughly $14 a month on a typical Entergy bill. Entergy's own vice president confirmed all of this on the record in February.
We paid for upkeep in every bill. No rule checked that it happened. The grid failed early, and the rebuild went back on our bills at 9.7% a year. Paying twice isn't a flaw in the system. It is the system.
The fix is already written. It's been on their shelf since 2023.
I'm Chris Justin, a licensed professional engineer and a former consultant to this Commission. I read these filings for a living, and everything above comes from the Commission's own record: its own consultant, its own lawyer, its own transcripts, and Entergy's own SEC filing. Here is what I'd fight for on the Commission. None of it needs the legislature, and most of it is already drafted:
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Audit the maintenance the way they already audit the construction.
The formula rate plan checks whether Entergy built what it said it would build, dollar for dollar, with interest on the difference. Add the same check for maintenance: prove the upkeep money we already paid was spent on upkeep, and refund what wasn't. The Commission's own consultant recommended the model in 2023, refunds for unspent vegetation budgets included. They buried it. I'd dig it up and extend it to every maintenance line.
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Take the finished rule off the shelf and vote on it.
A completed, industry-wide grid-resilience rule, requiring every utility to file and defend a real plan with real performance metrics, has been sitting in a parked docket since August 2023, never voted on. It doesn't need to be written. It needs somebody at the table who can defend it clause by clause when the utilities call it burdensome, and drive it home anyway.
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A real storm protection plan, defended in public, every year, like Florida.
Florida utilities file a ten-year storm protection plan and justify every dollar of it on the record, annually, before they collect a cent. That's a big part of why Florida's lights stay on and ours don't. Same Gulf, same storms. Louisiana has nothing like it, by choice.
The rules didn't die from a shortage of good intentions. They died because when the utilities called them onerous and bureaucratic, nobody on the Commission had the technical background to fight back. If you can't independently evaluate whether a five-year inspection cycle is reasonable, “too burdensome” sounds like a real argument, and you fold. That's what happened. I'm a licensed engineer. I know these standards, why each one exists, and which utility objections are legitimate versus which ones are a monopoly protecting its margins. The job isn't just voting for accountability. It's defending the standards line by line when the utilities push back, and driving them home anyway.
And it works when someone does it. Commission staff caught SWEPCO's vegetation budget written so loosely the company could legally have spent zero dollars and still complied; in March the Commission closed that loophole with a hard $18 million annual floor, competitively bid. In 2024, $125 million went back to Cleco and SWEPCO customers after a hearing examiner found a coal plant had been run imprudently. The tools exist. What's been missing is a commissioner who can read the filings and use them.
What I won't promise: getting back the maintenance money already collected. Louisiana law bars retroactive refunds, and anyone who promises you one is lying to you. What we can do is stop paying twice from here forward, starting with the next filing.
I'm running for a seat on this Commission, as the only viable candidate in this race who has pledged to take zero utility money and the only licensed professional engineer on the ballot. The Commission that buried its own reliability rules is not going to un-bury them on its own. Two of its five seats are yours to fill on November 3.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Isn't hardening the grid a good thing?
Hardening is good. Paying twice for it isn't. We already funded maintenance in our monthly bills; no rule required proof it was spent, and the Commission's own consultant found the “resilience” plan blends real hardening with catch-up replacement of equipment that was run past its useful life. I want the hardening. I also want somebody checking the invoice, and right now no rule requires anyone to.
Why don't they just bury the lines?
Burying a line costs roughly five to ten times what stringing it overhead does, and in south Louisiana you're often trading wind risk for water risk: buried equipment in a high water table that takes saltwater surge is its own expensive failure mode, which is why Florida runs a separate program just to flood-harden its underground gear. The answer is to bury the right miles, chosen with real analysis. Nobody in Louisiana has done that math. Entergy's $1.9 billion plan puts about 100 miles underground out of more than 3,200.
Doesn't FEMA pay for storm damage to the grid?
Not for Entergy or Cleco. For-profit utilities aren't eligible for FEMA disaster aid for their own restoration. Member-owned co-ops and public utilities are: they get 70 to 90 percent of storm costs reimbursed. Entergy recovers its storm costs from you instead, through the storm charge on your bill, roughly $14 a month on a typical Entergy bill. Entergy's own vice president confirmed this on the record at a Senate task force in February 2026.
Can we get back the maintenance money we already paid?
No, and I won't pretend otherwise. Louisiana law bars retroactive refunds of money already collected in rates. What the Commission can do is police the money going forward, and the record shows it works when someone bothers: in 2024, $125 million went back to Cleco and SWEPCO customers after a hearing examiner found a coal plant had been operated imprudently. The power exists. Someone has to show up and use it.
I'm on a co-op, or in New Orleans. Is this about my bill too?
Partly. Louisiana's electric co-ops, like Washington-St. Tammany and DEMCO, are member-owned and set their own rates, so a Public Service Commissioner doesn't vote on your co-op bill. Entergy New Orleans answers to the New Orleans City Council, not this Commission. But the PSC shapes the transmission and market costs baked into every electric bill in the state, co-op and New Orleans customers included. And if you're an Entergy Louisiana or Cleco customer, which is most of this district, every number on this page is about your bill.
What can I do right now?
Three things. Get on the alert list so you hear about the next filing before the vote, not after. If there's a rotting or abandoned pole on your street, photograph it and put it on the public record at ServiceMyPole.org. And if your electric bill doesn't make sense, send it to me at votechrisjustin.com/bill or bill@votechrisjustin.com and I'll translate it, free, no strings.
Who is behind this page?
Chris Justin, a licensed professional engineer, former consultant to the Public Service Commission, and a No Party candidate for the Commission in District 1 on November 3, 2026. The claims here trace to the Commission's own dockets, transcripts, and meeting record, federal reliability data (EIA Form 861), the state's own Legislative Auditor, and Entergy's own filings. These records are public. They are also hundreds of pages long and boring on purpose. Reading them is the job.