Haley Fisackerly, President & CEO Entergy Mississippi spoke to the Rotary Club of North Jackson at its April 14, 2020 meeting. The subjects in his presentation were: how COVID 19 & the most recent storms have affected Entergy Mississippi and how the company is preparing itself for the future.
Fisackerly has said that COVID-19 has greatly affected how the company works. Anyone who can perform their function from home is doing so. Field employees are adhering to the social distancing rules and where three field employees would have shared a truck to go to a work location, the three employees are using three trucks to get to the site.
COVID-19 could not have come at a worse time. The GrandGulf Nuclear facility is down for major work including refueling and a turbine control system upgrade. The plant was recently re-licensed by the NRC for 20 years extending its plant life to 2044. During the pandemic, Entergy is providing extensive customer assistance, including suspending disconnects for nonpayment of bills.
With respect to the recent storms, he said that outages in their service area were not as bad as they could have been. The damage was much worse north and east of their service area. Most of Entergy’s damage was in the northwest quarter and the Delta. Damage to their Arkansas sister company was much worse with over 110,000 customers without power.
Fisackerly said that Entergy is nearly complete with a project to replace all of the meters in their system in a project called Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI). The new meters permit automatic billing, better outage reporting, and anticipation of system problems. They are also able to measure and report both the consumption and production of electricity by customers.
Entergy recently received regulatory approval to build a multi-acre solar farm in the Mississippi Delta and is looking at ways to reduce the cost of electrical energy. For example, he discussed the installation of high-efficiency gas turbines which use 50% less energy than the ones they are replacing.
We thank Fisackerly for his presentation and for his leadership of Entergy Mississippi.