When severe weather rolls through Arkansas, customers will see crews working in neighborhoods and along roadways to restore power. Behind the scenes, another team is working just as intensely inside Entergy Arkansas’s Distribution and Operations Center.
Now, just in time for severe weather season, the center has undergone a major renovation designed to make storm response faster and more efficient.
“This control center is Entergy Arkansas’s hub to monitor all the power for our 740,000 customers,” said Adam Effrein, Entergy Arkansas Vice President of Reliability and Power Delivery. “When storms happen, the employees here are the ones who are truly the backbone of keeping us safe in the field.”
Inside the center, operators track real-time grid data, identify outages and coordinate where line crews are dispatched. During large storms the room becomes the heartbeat of restoration efforts statewide.
The renovation modernized the control room layout, replacing older cubicle setups with collaborative workstations equipped with additional monitors.
“We’ve adjusted our consoles to allow our team to work together, be more efficient and dispatch to outages more efficiently,” Effrein said.
The technology improvements also allow operators to detect outages much faster than in the past, speeding up the restoration process.
“We are able to monitor each individual customer’s metering at all times,” said Mark McCarroll, Distribution and Operations Center Manager. “We can see outages as they happen and respond more quickly.”
Storm resilience was also a major focus of the renovation. The building itself was already designed to withstand a tornado, but the upgrades ensure the facility can continue operating even during the most severe weather.
“Part of the renovation was getting additional power sources in here so we will never lose electricity and we can always be onsite,” McCarroll said. “We have three separate power sources, two utility feeds and one full backup generator.”
The upgrades allow Entergy Arkansas to tap into additional support from other Entergy operating companies when storms hit as well. That expanded capability means multiple control centers across the Entergy system can work together to monitor outages and coordinate restoration, speeding up response times for customers.
“In the past we’ve had to physically bring people into Arkansas,” Effrein said. “Now we can flip a switch in Louisiana, Mississippi or Texas and they can support us.”
The project is part of Entergy Arkansas’s Next Generation Arkansas plan which focuses on strengthening reliability and delivering better power across the state, with an initial goal of reducing power outages by at least 30% over the coming years.
“That means not having outages and if outages do occur, restoring them much quicker,” Effrein said. “This remodel truly allows us to provide better power to our customers.”
For the operators inside the control center, every storm brings the same mission.
“When the power goes out, there is nothing better than knowing that we are able to respond quicker, give our customers the level of service they deserve, and make a difference in people’s lives,” McCarroll said.
With the new upgrades in place, the team now has more tools than ever to monitor the grid, coordinate crews and help keep the lights on for communities across Arkansas.
