With increased storms expected this year during the upcoming hurricane season, Duke Energy is working to prepare the grid with self-healing technologies and resilience upgrades.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts an above-normal hurricane season with 17-25 named storms this season, including 8-13 hurricanes, and 4-7 of those becoming major hurricanes. This year’s forecast predicts around 30% more storm activity compared to the number of storms predicted last year.
Duke Energy maintains more than 17,000 employees and contractors ready to respond to outages when storms strike, and partnerships with peer utilities provide additional resources to shorten response times.
“We understand the importance of reliable power, especially when severe weather strikes,” said Scott Batson, Duke Energy senior vice president and chief power grid officer. “We are prepared for this year’s storm season, with thousands of line and vegetation workers, and advanced technologies and equipment ready to respond to storm-related outages when customers count on us the most.”
Duke Energy has been strengthening the electric grid against severe weather, upgrading thousands of poles and wires to increase reliability and better withstand storms, strategically placing outage-prone lines underground in some areas, managing trees and vegetation, and installing smart, self-healing technology that can automatically detect power outages and quickly restore power when an outage occurs.
The utility claims that in 2023, self-healing technology helped to avoid more than 1.5 million customer outages, saving more than 3.6 million hours of total lost outage time across the company’s six-state service area. Nearly 50% of Duke Energy customers are now impacted by self-healing and automated restoration technologies, more than double the number of customers served by smart restoration systems two years ago.
The company also recently completed a multi-year modernization project to construct seven new grid control centers across its six-state service area. These facilities are meant to help manage crews and outage response after storms, and can monitor millions of data points across the power grid in real time.
Apart from Duke Energy, other utilities across the nation are preparing for an above-average storm season.
FirstEnergy Pennsylvania Electric Company, a subsidiary of FirstEnergy doing business in eastern Pennsylvania as Met-Ed, recently completed an annual emergency preparation drill focused on testing its storm restoration process in the event severe weather causes outages throughout its large and heavily forested service area.
Individuals participated in the storm drill both remotely and in-person at Met-Ed’s Reading headquarters – a hybrid approach similar to how employees conduct real-life restoration activities using electronic storm tools to manage work in the field. The drill was designed to prepare employees for storm restoration duties and review restoration processes and storm-management tools.
The drill’s primary scenario focused on severe weather with organized lines of powerful June thunderstorms capable of producing gusts of greater than 70 mph sweeping across Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The gusts toppled trees, causing widespread damage to poles and wires and disrupting electric service to more than 400,000 of Met-Ed’s 592,000 customers.
Earlier in May, Florida Power & Light conducted its annual mock hurricane drill, simulating how it would respond if a hurricane struck the state and devastated the power grid.
The hypothetical Hurricane Benito, with 135 mph (215 kph) winds, did not really hit Florida, but it was imagined to be even stronger than real hurricanes Idalia and Ian, which seriously damaged portions of the state over the past two years.
Ian was one of the worst disasters ever to strike Florida, killing 150 people as it hit the Gulf Coast near Fort Myers in 2022, leaving millions without power. If Benito were a real storm, it likely would cause worse damage, as its imaginary path took it over the state’s most-populated area.
The National Hurricane Center is predicting the upcoming Atlantic and Gulf season, which runs from June 1 to Nov. 30, will exceed the yearly average of seven tropical storms and seven hurricanes, and that three of the storms will be major. Not all hurricanes make landfall.
This article contains reporting from the Associated Press.
