Did you lose power in Duke Energy’s rolling blackouts? We want to hear from you.

Caught between harsh winds and a looming deep freeze, half a million Duke Energy customers in the Carolinas had their lights — and heat — turned off on Christmas Eve.

The Charlotte Observer and The (Raleigh) News & Observer are continuing to report on what happened. You can help. Especially if you lost electricity on Saturday, Christmas Eve, please fill out our survey below.

For many people, the rolling blackouts came without warning.

Duke Energy — one of the largest in the United States — implemented the temporary and sporadic shut offs to avoid overwhelming its electrical grid to the point of collapse. That, Duke officials said, would have caused more people to lose power for longer.

The rolling blackouts lasted from around 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., officials have said. The plan called for most customers affected to have an outage for 15 to 30 minutes.

Where were rolling blackouts?

But Duke Energy hasn’t disclosed how spread out the blackouts where or which neighborhoods in a given city were chosen. For example, there were more than 100,000 outages reported in the Charlotte area on Saturday, most attributable to the blackouts. What’s not clear is whether the outages were clustered in the region’s most-populous areas or whether decisions were made by ZIP code or streets.

In response to questions from the Observer this week, a Duke spokesperson said:

“The rolling outages were not specific to communities. Our system determines where power is needed and where available capacity can be obtained through the use of targeted, temporary outages. The process is automatic and conducted to protect the larger system’s reliability, and to protect all customers we serve from a potentially longer or larger outage.”

This story was originally published December 29, 2022 at 12:18 PM.