New Orleans Built a Power Plant to Prepare for Storms. It Sat Dark for 2 Days.

The electric utility promised the plant would swiftly generate power during storms. It didn’t after Hurricane Ida, and many wonder why the city has put its faith in fossil fuels.

NEW ORLEANS — Linda Williams is used to power outages in her neighborhood, where strong winds often damage the electrical lines that crisscross her street. But Hurricane Ida was different. Within days of losing power, the heat was making her so dizzy that she had to stay in bed. “My head started spinning real, real bad,” said Ms. Williams, 71, who struggled to even wash dishes without starting to feel ill. Just a few miles from Ms. Williams’s house in New Orleans East sits a hulking mass of metal and wire that she and tens of thousands of other New Orleans residents help fund each month when they pay their bills to Entergy, the city’s sole electric utility. The 128-megawatt gas power plant went online last year with a promise that it would provide quick, reliable start-up power to a city that has struggled to withstand the ever-more-powerful storms that blow in from the Gulf of Mexico.