Entergy Arkansas and New Orleans IRPs

GridLab
Project completed.

Synapse provided technical assistance to the Southern Renewable Energy Association (SREA) during the Integrated Resource Planning (IRP) processes for Entergy Arkansas and Entergy New Orleans. We attended technical stakeholder meetings on behalf of SREA in both IRP proceedings and supported the drafting of comments and the stakeholder report for Entergy Arkansas’s IRP.

Our review and analysis identified several shortcomings in Entergy’s IRP, including:

  1. The use of low capacity accreditation, high capital cost assumptions, and limited consideration of tax credit eligibility for new renewable resources in its modeling;
  2. The hard-coding of near-term resource decisions without transparency into the underlying drivers;
  3. Scenario and portfolio construction that offers limited value in guiding the company’s action plan;
  4. An overreliance on simplistic and biased reliability analysis instead of conducting a robust resource adequacy assessment;
  5. A failure to model the full costs associated with new gas resources; and
  6. General modeling biases and limitations that skew outcomes in favor of gas and coal over renewable energy resources.

Related Publication(s):

Southern Renewable Energy Association's Comments on Entergy Arkansas, LLC's 2024 IRP (Docket No. 07-016-U) Stakeholder Committee Report on Entergy Arkansas 2024 Integrated Resource Plan