Duke Energy Indiana files six year reliability plan built on smart technology
Seeking to improve energy reliability in the Hoosier state, Duke Energy Indiana filed a six-year plan with state regulators last week to spur an overhaul of the grid through smart technology and infrastructure updates.
This, the company states, could improve the resilience of a system providing electricity to more than 860,000 customers in its service area. While this would be accompanied by a predicted rate increase of about 1 percent per year between 2024 and 2029, Duke Energy noted that the benefits would be fewer and shorter power outages, hardened infrastructure to better face extreme weather, a grid better suited to renewable energy onboarding and as many 1,270 new jobs.
“We’re creating a smarter electric grid that helps prevent outages and gets the lights back on sooner when problems do occur,” Stan Pinegar, Duke Energy Indiana president, said. “Our reliability ratings are good, but we need to prepare the electric grid for what’s to come, including electric vehicles and more customers generating their own green energy. As an electric service provider, the reliability of our service is job No. 1 for our 2,500 Indiana employees.”
Weather is one of the major causes of power outages, but Duke Energy Indiana believes many of these can be avoided by upgrading wood power poles to steel, undergrounding specific others, and updating substations along the way. Even then, outages can still transpire, but the company intends to roll out smart technologies capable of automatically detecting and isolating problems to reduce the impact on customers.
Currently, 11 percent of the company’s customers benefit from automated circuits. If the new plan is approved and implemented, that number could jump to approximately 65 percent.
“As with most products on the market, the technology available today is simply better than the technology that was available decades ago,” Pinegar said. “Adding more automation to our system gives us better visibility on our electric grid to detect problems and resolve them quicker.”
With the continued advent of renewable energy, particularly those customer-owned, Duke Energy Indiana also intends to redesign its grid to be more flexible. Unlike the one-way flow of the past, it hopes to modernize it to detect, react and adapt itself to changes in power usage.
According to internal company estimates, if all these grid improvements are implemented, power outages could be reduced by at least 17 percent and their duration at least 19 percent. All of this is dependent on the findings of the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission, though, which is expected to decide by July 2022.
