Duke Energy's ready to respond during peak of hurricane season; advanced technology saved 12.5 million minutes of customer outages during Hurricane Debby

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Sep 10, 2024, 10:22 ET

Grid improvements producing record-breaking reliability

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla., Sept. 10, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Duke Energy's year-round grid-strengthening work and advanced technology help keep Florida communities resilient and better protected against disasters such as hurricanes.

"Regardless of when and where the next storm strikes," said Melissa Seixas, Duke Energy Florida state president, "Duke Energy is ready, and we encourage our customers to take this time to reassess and communicate their emergency response plans with their families, friends, neighbors and employees."

According to the National Hurricane Center, the peak of the Atlantic hurricane season is Sept. 10, with most activity occurring between mid-August and mid-October.

Hurricane Debby, a powerful Category 1 storm, made an early landfall in Florida's Big Bend on Aug. 5. Duke Energy's Storm Protection Plan, including its advanced self-healing technology and year-round infrastructure work, is making a difference when it comes to improving reliability.

During Hurricane Debby, the company's self-healing technology saved more than 12.5 million minutes of customer total outage time and automatically restored more than 62,000 customer outages.

While a self-healing system can't repair the physical damage to the power line that a human crew must repair, it can reduce the number of customers affected by a power outage by up to 75% and can often restore power in less than a minute. More than 76% of Duke Energy Florida customers are served by this technology.

These investments enabled Duke Energy Florida to quickly restore power for 93% of its customers within 24 hours after Hurricane Debby made landfall.

"Throughout the year and across the 35 counties we operate in, Duke Energy teams are upgrading thousands of poles and wires, managing trees and vegetation, strategically placing outage-prone lines underground, enhancing substations and installing smart, self-healing technology that can automatically detect power outages and quickly restore power when an outage occurs," said Seixas.

During hurricanes Ian, Nicole and Idalia, self-healing technology helped save more than 200 million outage minutes for Duke Energy Florida customers.

Approximately 48% of Duke Energy Florida's primary power lines are underground and better protected from wind damage. The company will continue to install underground cable in areas that are identified as the most outage-prone areas.
Teams have completed more than 4,000 miles of maintenance trimming on Duke Energy Florida's distribution lines and 600 miles of planned work on the transmission side.
Over the past three years, more than 40,000 poles have been hardened through the Storm Protection Plan.
Additionally, the company is expanding capacity of the electric grid by building new substations, expanding existing substations and installing new or larger circuits to provide reliable service in the growing state. Duke Energy has completed optimization of 12 substations, with another 50 in flight in Florida.

"We understand this work can be invasive and disruptive during blue sky days," Seixas continued. "We appreciate our customers' patience as our teams work to protect and improve the service that you, your homes, businesses, schools, public safety facilities and hospitals rely on every single day."

In addition to making improvements and upgrades to its systems to enhance its storm readiness as well as support the rapid growth of our Florida communities, Duke Energy also credits its rapid response to decades of lessons learned and key collaborations with first responders as well as federal, state and local emergency management agencies.

For more information on the company's storm response during Hurricane Debby, visit https://illumination.duke-energy.com/articles/grid-investments-enable-quick-response-to-hurricane-debby.

For tips on how to prepare for severe weather, please visit duke-energy.com/StormTips.

Duke Energy Florida

Duke Energy Florida, a subsidiary of Duke Energy, owns 12,300 megawatts of energy capacity, supplying electricity to 2 million residential, commercial and industrial customers across a 13,000-square-mile service area in Florida.

Duke Energy

Duke Energy (NYSE: DUK), a Fortune 150 company headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., is one of America's largest energy holding companies. The company's electric utilities serve 8.4 million customers in North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky, and collectively own 54,800 megawatts of energy capacity. Its natural gas utilities serve 1.7 million customers in North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Ohio and Kentucky.

Duke Energy is executing an ambitious clean energy transition, keeping reliability, affordability and accessibility at the forefront as the company works toward net-zero methane emissions from its natural gas business by 2030 and net-zero carbon emissions from electricity generation by 2050. The company is investing in major electric grid upgrades and cleaner generation, including expanded energy storage, renewables, natural gas and nuclear.

More information is available at duke-energy.com and the Duke Energy News Center. Follow Duke Energy on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook, and visit illumination for stories about the people and innovations powering our energy transition.

Contact: Audrey Stasko
Media line: 800.559.3853
Twitter: @DE_AudreyS

SOURCE Duke Energy