All this heat and humidity we’ve been sweating through is causing some scattered outages for Duke Energy and its power grid, according to Duke Energy representative Jeff Brooks.
“We had some scattered outages due to equipment failures in the heat, but nothing widespread,” wrote Brooks in a text message, referring to outages on Tuesday and Wednesday. “We have seen high usage but we are able to meet customer needs and don’t anticipate any problems.”
Brooks said the scattered outages across the state the past couple of days are normal during extremely hot days. There were two big outages in Greensboro on Tuesday. Duke Energy hasn’t pinpointed the cause, but Brooks said it’s possible they were weather-related.
Brooks said many factors play a role in a heat-related outage. He said temperature, duration of that temperature, humidity level, day of the week and whether kids are in school and adults are at work all play a role in putting stress on the power grid.
“We tend to see more stress on the system when the temperature doesn’t cool off at all in the evenings,” said Brooks. “And then you have multiple days of high temperatures during the day and at night.”
The ability of Duke Energy to serve all of its customers on sweltering days also depends on the number of power plants it’s operating, said Brooks. “Fortunately, we do most of our maintenance on our power plants in the Spring and Fall when customer usage is lower.”
Brooks said Duke Energy is constantly making improvements to the grids used to serve its customers. “In the Triad and in places like Charlotte and Raleigh where we’re continuing to see people moving to the area, we have to make improvements to make sure that the grid remains reliable on very hot days and every day.”
Duke Energy is deploying more smart technology that can automatically reroute power to avoid problem areas, said Brooks. “We will be able to better manage pockets of high customer demand and better support usage on very hot days like we are experiencing.”