The Midcontinent Independent System Operator, the regional power grid operator with a headquarters in Little Rock, is poised to respond to the widespread turmoil expected from Hurricane Ida in Louisiana and beyond.
The grid and electricity market nonprofit, which guides transmission across 15 states and the province of Manitoba in Canada, activated its “Hurricane Management Command” on Friday, MISO said in a news release issued Sunday.
The storm has the potential to damage transmission and generation, as well as threatening thousands of lives and billions of dollars’ worth of property with storm surge, destructive winds and rain.
“We are taking measures to ensure grid and market operating systems remain secure and protected during the storm,” said Jessica Lucas, MISO’s senior director of reliability coordination. “We are coordinating with our member utilities to better understand their final preparations, including pre-positioning of generation resources and assessing their system damage predictions,” Lucas said in the release.
MISO issued a Severe Weather Alert and declared “Conservative Operations” until a minute before midnight Tuesday across the South Region.
Hurricane Ida was a Category 4 storm by Sunday morning and intensifying.
“Over the past year, we’ve reviewed lessons learned from the historic 2020 hurricane season with our members to prepare and respond to the impacts of tropical storms and hurricanes,” said Daryl Brown, executive director of the South Region, based in Little Rock. “Keeping the grid safe and reliable is critical to our industry and the customers we serve.”
At the time of Brown’s statement, Hurricane Ida was forecast to make landfall Sunday evening near New Orleans and continue to ravage the Louisiana coast overnight, then quickly move inland over the South Region as a tropical storm system.
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