The behind the scenes of Entergy power outages

When the power goes out, residents pull out candles and flash lights and yell at one another to keep the fridge closed, but it looks a little different behind the scenes for energy companies.

The Enterprise set out to find out what actually happens on Entergy Texas’ side between when the power goes out and the lights come back on.

Entergy Texas Vice President of Reliability Frank Shannon said the process typically begins when customers inform the company of the outage using the smartphone application, website or by phone.

“We also have our Distribution Operations Control Center, who are also able to tell when customers are out of power,” Shannon said. “Our Operations Center typically will dispatch a troubleshooter to go to the location of the customer’s home. Depending on what the call was in reference to, sometimes customers do give some comments that help us.”

For instance, sometimes customers will include that they heard a loud noise when the lights when out. Shannon said that is typically a good indicator that a fuse blew in a transformer.

Other times, the customer may include that a wire is on the ground, which is also good information for troubleshooters.

“Once that troubleshooter works through his processes and figures out exactly what the issue is, depending on the size and scope of the work that has to be done to restore the customer, he will or she will generally request additional resources,” Shannon said.

In this example, if the power is out because a transformer needs to be replaced, Shannon said Entergy would dispatch a crew with a new transformer to replace it and restore the power for the customer.

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