Duke Energy sets record summer power usage in Carolinas, restores power after storms
Last week, Duke Energy crews dealt with record-breaking power usage in North Carolina while responding to outages caused by severe storms across its two Carolinas utilities.
The company’s Duke Energy Carolinas utility set a summertime record for electricity usage on Monday, June 13, during the recent heat wave. That usage record was beaten two days later with more record heat and usage on Wednesday, June 15. The new summer peak usage record is 21,265 megawatt-hours of electricity for the hour ending at 5 p.m. Wednesday, June 15. It beat the previous record of 21,086 megawatt-hours, set two days earlier on June 13.
The region’s two utilities- Duke Energy Carolinas and Duke Energy Progress- also set a new combined summer peak usage record on June 13 of 34,089 megawatt-hours of electricity consumption for the hour ending at 6 p.m.
“We had a full week of very high temperatures, which resulted in record customer summer usage, but we had an effective plan in place and extensive preparations ahead of the season to reliably serve our customers throughout this stretch of hot weather,” Sam Holeman, Duke Energy vice president of system planning and operations, said.
At the same time, Duke Energy was dealing with multiple severe storms that struck its service area. Storms that hit Thursday in portions of South Carolina and North Carolina kept Duke Energy crews and contractors busy overnight into Friday. However, they faced an even stronger storm on Friday evening as explosive winds pummeled the service area, especially around the Triangle region of central North Carolina. These severe storms accumulated more than 100,000 outages in Wake and Durham counties, and the surrounding area, in about an hour.
“The storms erupted quickly and brought intense straight-line winds that resulted in significant outages across the state,” Jason Hollifield, Duke Energy’s system storm response manager for the Carolinas, said. “We immediately put our crews to work in the field overnight Friday and into the weekend to restore outages, as well as shifting thousands of workers to hardest-hit areas to assist with restorations.”
Around 6,000 Duke Energy workers and contractors, including 2,000 in the Triangle area alone, worked to restore power. Overall, crews restored more than 350,000 customers within 24 hours of the storm, and restoration was complete by Sunday evening.
“The sun and blue skies on Saturday really masked the extent of the severe damage we were working in some of our hardest-hit areas,” Hollifield said. “We know that when temperatures are high, an outage can be very unpleasant for customers. Our crews worked relentlessly to repair damage and get power back on as quickly and safely as we could for our customers.”
