A backup battery program that advocates say will keep the lights on at more than 1,000 New Orleans homes and businesses when the grid goes down has cleared a key hurdle at the City Council, moving the initiative one step closer to reality.
The Climate Change and Sustainability Committee on Wednesday adopted a draft of rules and incentives for the next phase of the post-Ida push by politicians and activists to subsidize the distribution of backup batteries, which can provide hours of electricity during an outage or relieve strain on the grid during peak demand.
The cost of the $26.6 million program — formally called the Battery Energy Storage System Distributed Energy Resource Pilot Program and dubbed the Neighborhood Power Plan by its backers — is covered by proceeds from a settlement with Entergy New Orleans over allegations that its parent company mismanaged the Grand Gulf nuclear plant…