Entergy Louisiana is asking the Louisiana Public Service Commission (PSC) to skip key steps of its standard regulatory review process for the largest proposed investment in the utility's history — a $21.37 billion plan to build gas plants and infrastructure to power a new Meta Platforms data center in Richland Parish.
One of the commission's own elected members says the process is moving too fast, and consumer advocates warn the financial risk ultimately falls on Louisiana ratepayers, not Entergy shareholders.
The application, submitted March 25, seeks approval of generation and transmission resources tied to a 20-year contract with Evest, LLC, a Meta subsidiary. Entergy is invoking the Commission's "Lightning Initiative" — a streamlined regulatory pathway the PSC adopted at its December 17 session in response to Gov. Jeff Landry's executive order of the same name to accelerate industrial development.
Under that initiative, Entergy is asking the PSC’s Administrative Hearings Division to compile a record of the proceeding without issuing a formal recommendation from an administrative law judge — a step that normally guides commissioners before they vote. Entergy wants that final vote on November 18, after this fall's elections, but before newly elected commissioners take office.
'Too early'
Commissioner Davante Lewis, who represents a district running from Baton Rouge through the River Parishes to New Orleans, voted against the Lightning Initiative when it was adopted and says the current motion raises serious procedural concerns.
"I'm struggling on it," Lewis said of the request to waive the administrative law judge’s recommendation. "I think this motion is too early to determine whether or not we should waive the [administrative law judge] making a formal recommendation to the body."
Lewis noted that the Lightning Initiative itself was added to the December agenda just 48 hours before the vote, with commissioners receiving the text of the rule only minutes before voting. It was never published in the PSC's official rules.
"We change long-standing commission policies, and we have published it nowhere but in the transcript of the hearing," he said. "That is not official notice to me."
The November timing drew particular concern. Lewis said he believes Entergy and Meta "made sure they got this agreement done in enough time to ensure that they could try to get a vote before November and December. I do think that was intentional."
He is pushing for the vote to be moved to December, arguing the case is far more complex than anything the eight-month Lightning Initiative timeline was designed to handle.
"We're telling ourselves we're going to take eight months on seven natural gas power plants," Lewis said. "To me, that timeline is a mismatch."
Ratepayer risk
Logan Burke, executive director of the Alliance for Affordable Energy, which has intervened in the docket, said the financial risk to ordinary Louisianans is significant and largely unacknowledged.
"Everything about how these are being structured leaves enormous risk on the back of ratepayers," Burke said.
Even if the project goes exactly as planned, she said, if Meta exits after 20 years, every other ratepayer in the state — residential, small business, and industrial — gets left with the bill. Because Entergy is a regulated monopoly, customers have no choice of provider. When the PSC approves an investment as “prudent,” Entergy is legally entitled to recover those costs through customer bills.
"That's a smaller and smaller pool of people that will be left holding that bag," she said, pointing to Louisiana's ongoing population decline.
Lewis flagged a similar concern, noting that, unlike the first Meta deal — where aging generation assets provided a natural hedge for ratepayers — this application offers no such cushion.
"We don't have that type of offset," he said. "There's about a 25% risk left for Louisiana ratepayers."
Burke also pointed to the 2009 Little Gypsy power plant in Montz, Louisiana, in which Entergy spent roughly $300 million converting a gas plant to coal before abandoning the project — and still recovered more than $200 million from ratepayers.
"Once the commission makes a determination of prudence," she said, "it is incredibly challenging, if not impossible, to claw that decision back."
The NDA question
Both Lewis and Burke flagged concerns about a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) signed by PSC Executive Secretary Brandon Frey with Louisiana Economic Development on July 24 — an agreement whose opening paragraph names the Louisiana Public Service Commission as a party.
Lewis said he was unaware that an NDA had been signed.
When asked about the agreement, LED said it applied only to Frey personally, not the commission as a whole. Attorney William Most, who has been tracking the proceeding, rejected that characterization.
"It is quite concerning that the agency responded and told something that is, I think, a flat untruth — bordering on an outright lie," Most, who has reviewed the agreement, said. "That is absolutely not what the contract says."
Burke described the combination of the NDA, the accelerated timeline and the lame duck vote window as a systematic removal of public accountability.
"When you put a decision of this magnitude on this kind of fast-track timeline, you are not considering the public interest," she said. "You cannot possibly be making a decision that is just or reasonable."
Lewis put the long-term stakes plainly: "The real threat to consumer protection is not what's going to happen to us today or tomorrow," he said. "It's what's going to happen 15, 20 and 30 years from now — because those will be the ramifications of a decision we made today that we can't really undo."
The PSC is scheduled to take up Entergy's procedural motion at its session on Wednesday (April 15). Entergy officials and Frey did not respond to requests for interviews or comment.
This story was produced by the Gulf States Newsroom, a collaboration between Mississippi Public Broadcasting, WBHM in Alabama, WWNO and WRKF in Louisiana and NPR.
