Half a million Duke Energy customers lost power in Dec. 24 outages. What else we know
About 500,000 Duke Energy customers lost power Christmas Eve as the company implemented power outages across North and South Carolina during one of the region’s coldest weekends in recent years.
Company spokesman Bill Norton provided additional details Tuesday about the blackouts, which began rolling out across the Carolinas around 6 a.m. on Saturday. The last residents got their power back around 6 p.m. that day.
Duke Energy was “not able to communicate as proactively as (it) normally (does),” Norton said, “given the fast-moving events that occurred in the early morning hours before most customers were awake.”
“We made the difficult decision to proactively implement rolling outages to protect the electric grid ... and to avoid a potential longer or broader outage to customers,” Norton said.
Tuesday’s blackouts were the first time that Duke Energy has deployed rolling outages like this in the Carolinas. The neighborhoods affected were determined through an automatic system that determined “where available capacity can be obtained through the use of targeted, temporary outages.”
“This was an extremely rare event,” Norton said, adding that the company will “thoroughly review these events for lessons learned.”
What happened?
Overwhelming demand for heat during the region’s arctic plunge last weekend led Duke Energy to roll out the blackouts, which were supposed to last 15 to 30 minutes.
The decision left hundreds of thousands of customers in North and South Carolina unexpectedly without power. Many took to social media to vent their outrage over the outages that were lasting, in some cases, for hours.
The Charlotte-based utility stopped the rolling outages at about 11:30 a.m. Saturday, Norton said. Power did not come on all at once, but rather returned to about 10,000 customers at a time.
But the utility provider asked customers to mind their usage of electricity through Monday morning to avoid the need for additional controlled outages to help protect the power grid.
Meeting with regulators
Duke Energy will be asked to explain the decision to implement rolling power outages to state officials next week.
The N.C. Utilities Commission, a state agency which regulates the rates and services of North Carolina utility providers, will receive a briefing from Duke Energy at its next regular weekly meeting on Jan. 3, spokesman Sam Watson said Tuesday.
Gov. Cooper’s concerns
Gov. Roy Cooper said Monday he was “deeply concerned” about those who lost power over the Christmas weekend without receiving notice from Duke Energy ahead of time.
Cooper said on Twitter that he wanted Duke Energy to provide him “a complete report on what went wrong and for changes to be made.”
In response to Cooper’s criticism, Norton said Monday that the company plans to “thoroughly evaluate” the way it serves customers during extreme conditions.
This story was originally published December 27, 2022 at 7:38 PM.
