Success Down South: Entergy Mississippi's Reliability Wins

Providing customers with electricity they can depend on at a price they can afford is the electric utility industry’s most important duty, and delivering on it is the longstanding mission of Entergy Mississippi. The utility’s recent reporting shows the efforts the company has put forth to maintain reliability and affordability over the years have yielded great results, which in turn enables more investment in power grid infrastructure and ever stronger performance.

Success in Entergy Mississippi’s reliability efforts is particularly evident in data comparisons from 2022 to 2023. Entergy follows an industry standard to capture power outage metrics, measuring the frequency and the duration of outages. Year to year, there was a 19.5% drop in the number of outages customers experienced. Plus, the average length of each outage decreased by 9% – or 8.5 million customer minutes.

The industry method excludes data from some severe weather events, such as the tornadoes that impacted the Mississippi Delta, to reflect the most common circumstances.
No singular sweeping change brought improvements to the utility’s performance. Instead, it was continued execution and increased spending on reliability programs.

Collective Efforts

Over the last five years, Entergy Mississippi’s investment in recurring reliability programs aimed at improving power delivery has increased by 14%. Notably, the FOCUS program – which stands for find, observe, collect, understand, and succeed – allows teams to study outage patterns for feeders and devices, and essentially find solutions to reduce interruptions. From engineers to operations coordinators to lineworkers, the FOCUS program works because experts with different talents come together to solve a targeted issue.

“Sometimes the solutions we find are simple fixes like replacing an insulator. Other times we have to pull in more resources. But the most important part is that the FOCUS program allows us to really zoom in,” said Philip Ozier, senior manager, engineering.

During this time, crews have completed 271 FOCUS projects. To understand the effectiveness of the completed project, we make before and after comparisons of the number of device outages and customer interruptions. These projects have successfully reduced outages for customers who get power from the upgraded devices by 62%. “Our continued investment and execution in this reliability program has helped us avoid 90,000 interruptions for our customers. Our teams are immensely proud of that,” Ozier said.

An increase in self-healing networks has also contributed to better performance. Self-healing networks include equipment that automatically isolates a circuit and restores power to a portion of the customers impacted by a circuit, without human intervention. This helps shorten outages and reduce the number of customers impacted by an outage. Entergy Mississippi investments have tripled the number of self-healing networks in the service area over the last three years.
Commitment to reliability programs like FOCUS and self-healing networks help make the greatest performance improvements across the grid, while keeping rates affordable.

Entergy Mississippi’s new Flora Transmission Office, opened last year, further bolsters the Mississippi power grid by bringing key operations together and supporting central substation groups.

Pole Savings

Also important to keeping utility bills low, power delivery teams have successfully turned what could have been a $13 million distribution pole replacement project into a $3.6 million effort. They did it by cleaning up data, outsourcing appropriately and using smart geographic strategy.
Historically, Entergy Mississippi approached aging distribution wood poles in a manner that scattered teams across the service area, treating or reenforcing some poles and replacing others. Despite ongoing replacement efforts, by 2023, our systems indicated a backlog of nearly 3,000 poles needing to be replaced.

But, just as the poles were scattered, so was the data. Entergy Mississippi dedicated analysts and engineers to comb through the information, discovering just 780 poles needing replacement.
And while replacing a distribution pole can cost $17,000 on average, power delivery teams identified efficiencies in its engineering approach and reduced construction labor by targeting poles by region. The cost per pole was eventually reduced to just $5,000.

“Not only have we gotten the backlog down to under 200 poles since last year, these poles were identified just 6 months ago. The savings and this new replacement process benefits our customers by allowing us to tackle aging distribution poles on a quicker cycle,” said Randy Vaughan, director, project delivery.

The $9 million in savings from the pole replacement project helps Entergy Mississippi continue its pledge to provide affordable service, by allowing the company to invest in more reliability programs.

Fortifying the Future

While celebrating the strides made in bolstering electric service reliability, Entergy Mississippi is also monitoring evolving challenges posed by intensifying weather events.

In 2023, Entergy helped expand or attract 63 different economic development projects to its service area, which represents a local capital investment of more than $17.7 billion and more than 3300 new jobs. Of that, 10 projects were located in the Mississippi service territory, adding up to about $243.4 million in capital expenditures and 625 jobs.

One of these projects was a $10 billion project with Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is planning two new projects in the state. Attracting a large customer like AWS will help keep rates lower for all customers than they otherwise would be in the future. The project will support nearby power grid advancements and power generation investments across the state, which will bring additional economic benefits.

Fueling a Better Grid

The utility’s three-year capital plan includes large investments in the transmission and distribution system.

According to Entergy’s 2023 Perform-ance Report, these investments will serve customer growth and improve reliability and resilience, improving our customers’ experience. Entergy plans to expand and modernize its system, including new lines and substations, targeted upgrades and enhancements, self-healing technology and asset hardening. New assets installed on the grid will meet the latest resiliency standards.

Entergy Mississippi recently completed a $1.3 million project to update a major transmission pathway coming from the Grand Gulf Nuclear Station. The project supports affordability and significantly lowers the risk of transmission interruptions between Entergy Mississippi’s single largest power resource and the Franklin Substation located in Franklin County, Mississippi. The project, which was born from a study to find opportunities for improved reliability, included replacing two transmission line structures outside the substation, and reconfiguring equipment inside of it.

In DeSoto County, Entergy Mississippi finished construction in March for a new distribution substation for the Snowden Grove Park community in Southaven. The substation is part of a $37 million project, which included nearly two miles of new transmission lines, 12 miles of new and rebuilt distribution lines and 74 composite poles. The need for the project is driven by rapid growth in the area across the residential, commercial and industrial customer bases. The Snowden Park Substation will alleviate power grid stress from this new growth as well as improve reliability for nearby substations.

The Mississippi Forestry Commission’s discovery of more than 12.5 million dead trees across the state compounds the threat to the power grid. Comparing the first three months of 2024 to the average from the previous three years, outages caused by fallen trees are up by 160%.