New Iberia sits in the heart of Acadiana, strung along the slow bend of
Bayou Teche in the middle of Louisiana’s
sugarcane country. Power here doesn’t come from one company: Cleco
Power serves most homes inside the city, while SLEMCO,
the Acadiana electric co-op, covers much of the rural parish. Both run miles of overhead line
through open cane fields and live oaks — exactly the kind of grid a hurricane goes after first.
Geography is the rest of the story. Much of New Iberia is flat, low, and close to the water,
which means flooding and backwater rise are part of life here. When the power drops in a storm,
so do sump pumps, freezers full of a season’s catch, and the air conditioning you can’t do
without in an Acadiana summer.
And out past the city limits, the grid gets thinner. Long rural feeders to homes near
Loreauville, Jeanerette, and Avery Island can
take far longer to restore than a city block — after a major storm, rural Iberia Parish has
waited days, sometimes longer, for crews to work back down every line.
A permanently installed standby generator sidesteps all of it. It detects the outage and
restores power automatically — usually within seconds — and runs for as long as the grid is down.
See how installation works →