It was a chance for the people in northern Attala County to find out why their power keeps going off.
“They’re not being provided reasonably adequate service,” says Public Service Commissioner Chris Brown was at a town hall meeting in Carmack last night. Entergy-Mississippi’s CEO Haley Fisackerly told the crowd of more than 200 people that the company is working to reduce the number of outages systemwide by making major improvements in the power grid, using money that large industrial customers like Amazon will be paying for electricity as their data centers come online across central Mississippi.
“We announced a program this past fall that’s we’re implementing now called Superpower Mississippi, where we’re increasing our reliability budget by over 50 per cent up to $1 billion. That 50 per cent increase is being covered 100 per cent by these data centers that are coming into the state, 100 per cent at no cost to you.”
Entergy’s goal is to reduce outages by 50 per cent over the next five years by doing more tree-trimming near power lines, using stronger poles to better withstand high winds and installing technology to make the power grid smarter.
The Public Service Commission says part of the problem in northern Attala is the way the electrical system is set up in that area. When a power line is knocked down or a transformer blows, service is lost until repairs can be made– unlike many other parts of the state which now have redundancy built into their electrical grid to re-route power after an outage to restore service more quickly.
