BNB Spotlight Sponsor - January 2026: How Entergy Is Strengthening the Local Grid

At the Business Networking Breakfast presented by ServiceMaster TRS, Entergy outlined a clear plan to support East Montgomery County's rapid growth while protecting the local grid from outages caused by extreme weather. The company explained how investments in generation, transmission, and community-focused operations will keep rates competitive and reliability high for homes, businesses, and incoming industries such as data centers.

Entergy Texas: scale, responsibility, and local focus

Entergy Texas serves southeast Texas with a team of roughly 1,500 employees and more than 537,000 customers across 27 counties. That scale brings both responsibility and opportunity: the utility company positions itself as a steward of local infrastructure, focused on ensuring reliable service as communities and businesses expand.

Connected to a larger grid — not ERCOT

Unlike other parts of the state, Entergy is not part of ERCOT. Instead, it operates inside the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) footprint and the Eastern Interconnection. That connection means Entergy benefits from wide-area transmission and generation support during emergencies, while maintaining local generation and control.

Entergy noted it already controls a meaningful chunk of generation capacity locally and plans to increase that number to meet rising demand.
 

Step Ahead program: adding capacity while keeping rates affordable

Entergy’s Step Ahead program targets a 40 percent growth in capacity within four years. The strategy centers on three priorities:

• Keep rates affordable — Texas’ attractiveness is tied to cost competitiveness. Maintaining low electricity costs is crucial to attracting businesses and data centers.
• Build dispatchable generation — customers expect the lights to come on when they flip the switch. Entergy is prioritizing generation that can be dispatched on demand.
• Expand transmission and weather-hardening — routing power efficiently and protecting the grid from extreme weather are central to reliability improvements.

"When you turn the light switch on, you want the lights to come on."

Major projects and multi-billion-dollar investments

Entergy has received recent approvals from the Public Utility Commission to move forward with multiple projects. These include new power plants, fuel infrastructure, and major transmission builds. Highlights include:

• OCAP plant — approximately $1.2 billion and expected to come online soon.
• Legends and Lone Star plants — ground-breaking planned in the coming year.
• Triton Pipeline — fuel delivery infrastructure to support new plants.
• $2 billion transmission line — to move power where it’s needed across the region.

In total, Entergy is investing billions of dollars in generation, natural gas delivery, and transmission to ensure the region can meet demand without sacrificing affordability.

Local impact: Millbend substation and better reliability

Local projects like the Millbend substation demonstrate the direct benefits of these investments. Millbend includes two large transformers (about 50 MVA each) providing roughly 100 megawatts of capacity, plus six miles of transmission to feed new and existing customers.

The substation enables more feeders, which translates into higher reliability and improved service for thousands of residential and commercial customers in East Montgomery County.

People-first approach: organizational health and service

Reliability isn’t just about equipment. Entergy highlighted its focus on organizational health and employee well-being. The company has improved its net promoter score from 2023 to 2025, reflecting better customer and employee experiences. Their logic is simple: if the workforce is supported, customers benefit.

Attracting data centers and the next wave of industry

Data centers are a growing part of local demand. Entergy already has agreements in place with companies across Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas, and is negotiating to bring data centers to the region. Keeping electricity rates competitive is a major lever for attracting these energy-intensive facilities.

What this means for businesses and the community

• Greater reliability through new substations, transmission, and dispatchable generation.
• Economic growth as infrastructure investments make the area more attractive to employers and new industries.
• Resilience to extreme weather via weather-hardening and strategic grid planning.
• Cost competitiveness preserved by balancing new investment with rate stewardship.

Entergy’s multi-pronged approach — combining large capital projects, grid modernization, and attention to employees and customers — aims to keep East Montgomery County powered, protected, and positioned for continued growth.