Tropical Storm Helene snapped utility poles and downed lines across South Carolina on Friday, Sept. 27, 2024, particularly in the Upstate and along the Georgia border. Columnist Paul Hyde, who lives in Anderson, reports his city was a mess of fallen trees and hanging power lines. (Paul Hyde/Special to the SC Daily Gazette)
COLUMBIA — Widespread and lingering power outages far from coastal cities more accustomed to dealing with hurricanes have prompted conversations about what more utilities could do in South Carolina to get the lights back on sooner.
Outages from Helene in South Carolina, Florida and Georgia peaked at around 1.3 million customers each, according to multiple news outlets and archived data from PowerOutage.US . In North Carolina, outages reached 1.5 million, according to reports from Duke Energy and the state’s power cooperatives.
Duke Energy, which supplies electricity in Florida and the Carolinas, found itself working across three impacted states at once after the storm made landfall on the Florida coast as a Category 4 hurricane, tore up the Georgia-South Carolina border and wreaked havoc in the North Carolina mountains.
But more South Carolinians were in the dark for longer.
In Florida, for example, power was restored within 24 hours to more than half those who lost it.
Repairs lagged in the Palmetto State more than anywhere else in the Southeast as crews have had to cut their way through fallen trees and replace thousands of snapped power poles.
Three days after the storm, South Carolina had nearly 689,000 outages, compared to about 491,000 in Georgia and about 398,000 in North Carolina.
“This is unprecedented damage,” said Central Electric Power Cooperative CEO Rob Hochstetler, speaking on behalf of the state’s 19 cooperatives, particularly those serving the more mountainous parts of the Upstate.
“This is not a typical storm restoration. It’s a rebuild,” he said Sept. 30, three days after Helene’s winds blew through.
While surveying damage across the state, Republican U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, who grew up in Central, called for the burying of more power lines as a potential solution.
Duke Energy’s South Carolina president said power outages in the Upstate are not typically due to tropical storms.
“In the Upstate, what I usually lose sleep over and think about most is an ice storm. We’ve had those before that cause this level of destruction. So, we do what we can to build infrastructure,” Mike Callahan said.
Still, burying lines is expensive, Dominion Energy South Carolina President Keller Kissam said, and it’s not full proof.
It costs five times more — ten times more in the case of large transmission lines — to put power lines underground as opposed to overhead, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Buried lines can still be impacted by flooding, unearthed by tree roots and can take longer to repair. It’s cheaper to do during initial construction and is common in newly built neighborhoods, according to the data from 2012 .
After an ice storm in 2002, the state of North Carolina commissioned a study that found burying all lines would cause most people’s electric bills to go up by 125%, cost a total of $41 billion, and take 25 years to complete, according to the 2003 report .
“Instead, we focus on a variety of other grid improvements that often can deliver better reliability,” Jeff Brooks, a Duke Energy spokesman, told the SC Daily Gazette in an email Monday.
For example, both Duke and Virginia-headquartered Dominion Energy have upgraded lines and poles in South Carolina to make them stronger, especially in coastal areas or places where high winds are common.
Both also have invested in technology that automatically detects power outages and quickly reroutes power to other lines to restore service faster. Brooks said this often reduces the number of customers impacted by 75% where deployed.
“We can make every type of improvement and not completely eliminate outages. So, we need a system that can recover quickly when a disruption occurs,” Brooks said.
More than 70% of Duke Energy’s nearly 2 million Florida customers benefit from the technology . Brooks said the utility is installing it in South Carolina and other states the company serves but did not immediately respond to follow up questions about how widely it’s available in the Carolinas.
While burying lines is expensive, utility executives say they do put some stretches of line that routinely lose power underground.
“We have a tremendous amount of reliability data that can tell us specific spans of line between two poles that may have a reliability challenge,” Brooks said. “So as our data analytics get more precise, we are able to more strategically place sections of line underground when needed.”
About a third of Duke’s South Carolina power lines are buried, he said.
As of last year, Duke also told Axios Charlotte about a third of its power lines in North Carolina were underground. And Axios Richmond reported Dominion Energy had buried 4,000 miles of outage prone lines in its North Carolina and Virginia.
In Florida, just shy of half of Duke’s lines are underground.
And in Horry and Georgetown counties, which are served by Santee Cooper, the state-owned utility has been systematically undergrounding coastal lines for several years. But its thousands of miles of large transmission lines, which provide electricity to the state’s power cooperatives, are above ground, said CEO Jimmy Stanton.
The cooperatives have some 80,000 miles of lines above ground, said Hochstetler, the Central Electric Power CEO.
Dominion Energy South Carolina has about 3,500 miles of large transmission lines and 26,000 miles of smaller distribution lines above ground, according to Kissam.
Dominion, Santee Cooper and cooperative officials all said they offer cost-sharing plans for towns and cities that want to split the cost of burying lines.
The town of Hilton Head, for example, worked with Palmetto Electric Cooperative and covered most of the cost to underground lines across the island. That $35 million project, which removed 3,574 poles, 1,238 overhead transformers and 115 miles of overhead power lines, took 17 years to complete and largely was paid for by a monthly 3% fee on power bills collected from the town’s 35,000 residents and 1,800 businesses.
The town did not have exact figures for how much that added to the typical residential customer’s bill.
By Monday afternoon, 10 days out, more than 51,400 South Carolina customers still had no power, according to numbers provided at a briefing led by Gov. Henry McMaster. Outages were higher in both neighboring Georgia and North Carolina.
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