The lights went out during this week's storm and stayed out for about 24 hours. For a lot of us on the West Bank and across the city, that was a first at this length outside a named hurricane. The instinct that follows is a fair one: something bigger must be going on. Are the data centers everyone keeps talking about pulling so hard on the grid that the rest of us go dark?
The honest answer, for this outage, is no. A storm that downs lines and damages equipment is a repair problem, not a supply problem. And the places people compare, New Orleans, Indiana, Memphis, do not sit on the same grid. Memphis runs on a separate system served by the Tennessee Valley Authority. Indiana is split between other regional operators. New Orleans sits inside Entergy's territory in the MISO South region. Three different systems, three different weather days, no shared switch that ties them together.
But the instinct is not wrong. It is just pointed at the wrong week. The data center story in Louisiana is real, it is large, and the decision that matters is coming up fast.
What is actually being built
About 250 miles north of here, in Richland Parish, Meta is building one of the largest data centers in the world. To power it, Entergy Louisiana is building new gas generation and transmission. The Louisiana Public Service Commission approved the first three gas plants in 2025. By spring 2026, Entergy had returned asking for seven more.
Taken together, that is roughly 7.5 gigawatts of new gas capacity tied to a single customer's buildout. For scale, that is several times the peak electricity demand of the entire city of New Orleans. The plants received an expedited review under a fast-track process the state opened in late 2025 for large projects, rather than the multi-year hearings these facilities normally get.
The commission is scheduled to vote on the larger plan in December.
Why it reaches your bill
Entergy's public position is that this buildout benefits every customer and strengthens reliability across its system, and that Meta will cover most of the cost of the new plants for a set period. That is the case the company has to make to win approval.
Intervenors have pushed back hard. Groups including the Alliance for Affordable Energy, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and Earthjustice have argued in filings that the ratepayer benefit does not hold up under scrutiny, that costs and risk could shift onto ordinary customers, and that the public was denied information it needed to weigh in. In July, an administrative law judge ordered Meta to turn over load and jobs data it had withheld. By their modeling, the arrangement could mean billions in additional utility profit over two decades, a figure Entergy disputes.
That is the argument to watch, and it has nothing to do with this week's hailstorm. The plants for Meta are meant to be dedicated generation. But the transmission is shared, the plants connect to the same grid the rest of us draw from, and Entergy has disclosed a load pipeline well beyond Meta alone. The real reliability question is not whether a data center caused your outage. It is this: as that load stacks up on the system, how thin does the margin get on the day a storm and a heat wave land together, and who carries the cost and the risk when it does?
What to watch
The December LPSC vote is the moment the seven-plant plan is decided. Between now and then, the docket filings are public, and so is the intervenor testimony. That is where the load numbers, the reliability modeling, and the ratepayer math live.
This piece is the short version. A fuller investigation into the filings, the reserve-margin numbers, and what Entergy's own forecasts show is in the works, and it will run here.
How to follow this
If your Entergy bill has jumped, if you work in or around the Richland Parish project, or if you have documents or firsthand knowledge of how these decisions are being made, reach out. Reader tips shape the follow-up. You can watch the docket yourself through the Louisiana Public Service Commission, and this outlet will track the December vote as it approaches.
Kim M. Braud is the Founder & Editor of Evans Cutchmore Press, an independent newsroom covering Louisiana and the Gulf South. Her reporting focuses on government accountability, infrastructure, business, culture, and the public policies that shape communities.
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