Following Hurricane Ida’s impact on Louisiana, the storm left the entire city of New Orleans and much of the state at large without power following significant damage to critical electric transmission lines. Subsequently, infrastructure advocates in Congress are using this crisis as an opportunity to pitch grid resiliency funding in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Agreement that recently passed the Senate. As passed in the Senate, the agreement includes $50 billion for critical infrastructure resiliency and $65 billion for the power grid. Following the storm this past weekend, Senator Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana) stated that, “we gotta start now for next year’s hurricane, next years wildfire, next years tornado and that infrastructure package is part of that…I’m sure hoping that Republicans look around my state, see this damage and say if there’s money for resiliency, money to harden the grid, money to help sewer and water, then maybe this is something we should be for.”
