Advanced technology kept lights on during Hurricane Debby, says Duke Energy

As Duke Energy prepares for the peak of hurricane season, work done to strengthen its grid using advanced technology prevented 12.5 million minutes of customers’ time without power during Hurricane Debby, officials said.

On Aug. 5, Hurricane Debby hit Florida’s Big Bend area as a Category 1 storm. However, Duke Energy officials said, the company’s Storm Protection Plan, including its advanced self-healing technology and year-round infrastructure work, strengthened the grid’s resiliency and led to better reliability.

“Regardless of when and where the next storm strikes,” Melissa Seixas, Duke Energy Florida state president, said. “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 began on Sept. 10 and runs through mid-October. Duke officials said self-healing technology has saved more than 12.5 million minutes of customer total outage time and automatically restored service to 62,000 customers during Hurricane Debby.

While the self-healing technology can’t repair power lines that have been physically damaged, it can reduce by 75 percent the number of customers affected by a power outage and can often restore power in less than a minute. Officials with the company said that more than three quarters (76 percent) of Duke Energy Florida customers are served by the technology. The technology and other investments into the grid helped Duke Energy restore power for 93 percent of its customers within 24 hours of Hurricane Debby making landfall, officials said.

“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,” Seixas said.

The post Advanced technology kept lights on during Hurricane Debby, says Duke Energy appeared first on Daily Energy Insider .