The future of Louisiana’s power grid is currently being hashed out at the Louisiana Public Service Commission, the state’s regulator overseeing electric utilities like Entergy Louisiana and Cleco Power.
In the fall of 2025, each of those utilities kicked off their own multi-year integrated-resource planning (IRP) process, which allows Commission staff and other stakeholders to weigh in on utilities’ plans for meeting electricity demand 20 years into the future. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has weighed in via technical comments on the initial modeling assumptions of both Entergy and Cleco. Cleco was set to publish a draft version of its detailed IRP this week, but now the utility wants to wait until May. (More on that later.)
Though Louisiana’s IRP process has its fair share of issues, a ruling by a Commission administrative law judge over the summer marks an important improvement in transparency. But there’s still a long way to go in improving this planning process.
Judge rules utilities must respond to discovery requests
The judge’s ruling, issued in June 2026 in Entergy’s IRP, stated that formal “discovery” is permitted in Louisiana IRPs. That means when stakeholders seek detailed information from the utility company, the utility must respond to those information requests. This is in contrast to how Louisiana’s IRPs have historically been conducted, where utilities have only informally answered a limited number of questions from stakeholders within the proceeding, making the discovery process essentially voluntary and making the entire resource-planning process much more opaque.
The judge issued the ruling in response to a motion by the Alliance for Affordable Energy (with Earthjustice’s legal representation), Sierra Club, the Southern Renewable Energy Association, and UCS. At the time that motion was filed, Entergy hadn’t responded to a single request for information over the course of several months, including from LPSC staff.
In UCS’s April 2026 analysis on the potential impacts of Louisiana’s AI data center growth, we recommended the Commission implement IRP discovery requirements as one measure to facilitate better planning for the uncertain future of AI. This new ruling sets the precedent for current and future IRPs and is one important step toward making the state’s electricity-resource planning more transparent, particularly in an era where Louisiana residents are feeling the impacts of electricity bill increases and staring down significant additional increases in the near future.
Further, Louisiana utilities continue to over-rely on polluting gas-fired power plants, which contributed 66% of power-sector electricity and 72% of total statewide electricity (including for commercial and industrial uses) in 2025. And residents continue to experience power outages due to both distribution-system disruptions, power plant outages, and lack of transmission connectivity, the latter two contributing to multiple rolling-blackout events in 2025. It’s past due for the Commission to ensure that Louisiana utility companies are planning wisely and investing in a future power system that serves residents at a reasonable cost, while minimizing risk to public health and safety.
Though the IRP is non-binding, meaning utilities may end up building resources that don’t align with their final plans, this long-term planning process serves as a roadmap for how companies will meet future power demand in the face of a whole host of uncertainties. Making sure that regulators and other stakeholders have the same information as utilities is an essential improvement to this process and should lead to more people-centered investments.
However, there are still many improvements that need to be made, both to the IRP process itself, and the substance of utilities’ plans thus far.
IRPs need clearer and tighter timelines
While the discovery ruling in Entergy’s IRP proceeding was positive, it underscored the need for other reforms to ensure that the process stays relevant for guiding actual utility investments. Entergy’s IRP has been delayed, and Cleco now wants to delay its IRP too.
Plus, the ruling brought to light a new issue.
Because the ruling did not provide a timeline for when utilities must respond to a given discovery request, utilities have been taking multiple months to fully respond to discovery requests by stakeholders. This is in large contrast to the proceedings where utilities are actually applying to build new infrastructure and charge ratepayers for it. In those proposals, a clear turnaround time is set at the beginning. For example, in Entergy’s proposal to build 7 more gas plants for Meta Platforms’ data center, the Commission set a 15-day turnaround time for discovery responses.
The IRP process will foster much more productive collaboration once utilities start providing more certainty on when Commission staff and other stakeholders can expect responses to discovery requests. Without that certainty, independent analysis and feedback for informing resource plans is more difficult to plan for, and is largely at the whims of when utility companies provide responses. We recommended the Commission clarify a specific turnaround time for IRP discovery as soon as it can.
The discovery dispute with Entergy also reminded all stakeholders of how drawn out of a process the IRP can be. And now that the dispute has pushed the schedule back, it will be further delayed.
Entergy (along with other utilities) first filed to start this process in the fall of 2025. The company was initially scheduled to publish its draft IRP, the first version of a detailed plan, in October 2026, but is now going to publish it in April 2027. This means that the process won’t be wrapped up until April 2028 at the earliest. The state of Louisiana’s power grid will likely be in a completely different state by that time.
This type of uncertainty will never go away completely, and utilities shouldn’t be expected to try to account for every major change that takes place during an IRP proceeding. But unfortunately, Cleco is now attempting some version of that.
Just two days before the company was set to publish its draft IRP report, Cleco filed a “notice” that it is seeking to delay the report until May 2027 because a final Commission decision on one of its new gas plant proposals isn’t expected until March 2027. In other words, Cleco is trying to make the case that it essentially needs time for an IRP re-do because of one new power plant. If utilities resort to delaying the IRP every time circumstances change, as opposed to just adjusting their existing analyses, the IRP will never get done. Cleco’s new proposed schedule doesn’t foresee the process completing until June 2028 at the earliest.
The bottom line is that the longer this process drags out, the less relevant the resource plan will be to the actual state of the world when it is completed. A shorter timeline for these proceedings, and strengthened accountability for utilities to stick to those timelines, should be top priorities for the Commission in crafting reforms.
Up-to-date information is crucial
I must also stress that some factors leading to an out-of-date IRP are completely avoidable.
Entergy, for example, filed its initial modeling assumptions in January 2026, which was before the company proposed seven more gas plants, plus additional infrastructure, for Meta’s data center in March 2026. However, even in an April 2026 update to its assumptions, the company still did not include any modeling scenarios with those seven plants or the associated data center load. Entergy said in discovery that it isn’t planning to include in its IRP modeling any of the Meta-driven projects, resulting in more than $15 billion in proposed construction costs going unanalyzed in its long-term vision of Louisiana’s power system.
Such a glaring and avoidable omission should not be permitted in this important resource-planning process. A judge overseeing the Entergy/Meta proceeding noted in a July ruling that the proposal is “larger in scale than any previous request before this Commission.” If there’s any project that should be included in an IRP, it’s this one—especially given the uncertainty of what the AI data center landscape will look like in the future.
The Commission must make reforms to its IRP process to address these types of shortcomings, and harmonize the reformed process with new, binding protections from data center impacts. (If you want to read more about the data center piece of this, read UCS’s comments alongside the Alliance for Affordable Energy and Earthjustice.)
Utilities should not repeat past IRP mistakes
Louisiana’s IRP process is now more transparent following the June discovery ruling, which is worth acknowledging. However, the substance of utilities’ resource plans thus far suggest they may be repeating some of the same mistakes they made in the previous cycle. I’ll briefly get into a couple of these shortcomings in their approach, but if readers want more detail, I recommend reading our comments on how Entergy and Cleco can improve their IRP modeling approaches.
First, Entergy and Cleco failed to mention in their filed assumptions how they would evaluate transmission options, which IRP rules require. As more information came out in discovery and stakeholder meetings, it became clear that neither utility was planning on evaluating transmission options in their IRP modeling.
Commission staff criticized utilities for doing this in the previous IRP cycle, yet the companies appear intent on repeating themselves. By ignoring transmission options and not allowing energy models to “build” new transmission capacity, the models will resort to building power plant capacity that may not have been selected in a more holistic analysis. In the real world, this will likely lead to Louisiana utilities missing out on electricity sharing across much longer distances, which can substantially reduce ratepayer costs, reduce power-outage risk, and cut fossil fuel emissions. Utilities should be evaluating transmission investments in their IRPs, and there are readily available modeling tools that have those capabilities.
Additionally, utilities should be assessing the possibility of power plants retiring earlier than expected due to lack of economic value, policy changes, or other changing circumstances. Cleco has said it plans to evaluate these types of “premature” plant retirements, but Entergy claims that this is not part of the IRP process. Once again, Commission staff criticized Entergy in the last IRP cycle for not evaluating the possibility of early retirements, which is within its model’s capabilities. But the company is seeking to only use its own pre-determined plant retirement dates, as opposed to allowing its model to produce potential early retirements as modeling outputs.
This is particularly concerning because of the massive risk of “stranded assets”—essentially worthless assets that have been built but are no longer useful—arising from the growth of data centers. Entergy is seeking to build roughly $20 billion worth of infrastructure to serve one data center site to be used by Meta Platforms. Even 20 years from now, there will be billions in infrastructure costs that ratepayers will be on the hook for, and the problem could be even worse if Meta exits early.
These are exactly the types of risks that should be contemplated and debated in the IRP proceeding, but Entergy claims that the analysis of early retirements and stranded assets is not part of the IRP process. The Commission’s stated goal of the IRP is for utilities is to comprehensively evaluate resource options to determine the most “economic and reliable” resource plan, which isn’t possible to accomplish if resources’ lack of economic value is ignored. The Commission should be requiring utilities to conduct such analysis to protect Louisiana ratepayers from paying for more money-losing infrastructure.
A good start, but more IRP reforms are needed
Louisiana utilities are now required to respond to discovery requests in IRPs, due to the administrative law judge’s June ruling. That’s undoubtedly a step in the right direction for transparency and ensuring utilities are mapping out a power grid that better serves communities across the state.
But the Commission should not continue allowing utilities to respond to those requests whenever it is convenient for them. IRPs should be brought to the same standard as other Commission proceedings and have pre-set discovery-turnaround deadlines to allow for more effective collaboration and stakeholder engagement.
And finally, the Commission should open a new rulemaking proceeding to field input on other potential IRP reforms. The proceeding would allow a diverse set of stakeholders to weigh in on how the state could make the process more useful, including shortening the entire IRP timeline and different ways to bolster utility accountability. With all the challenges residents are currently facing, long-term planning of the power grid should be a top priority for utilities and the Commission.