Duke Energy Florida uses technology to limit power outages this storm season

Duke Energy Florida is deploying its smart, self-healing technology to limit power outages as the summer storm and hurricane season hits the state.

Like a GPS can reroute traffic during an accident, self-healing technology can automatically detect power outages and quickly reroute power to restore service faster or avoid the outage altogether. In 2021, the technology helped avoid nearly 250,000 extended customer power outages in Florida, saving almost 17 million minutes of total lost outage time.

“We are working hard to deliver electricity that is reliable, increasingly clean, and more secure,” Duke Energy Florida state president Melissa Seixas said. “We know that storms are increasing in frequency and intensity, so it’s important that we take steps today to protect the grid from the impacts of severe weather and increase reliability for all our customers.”

In August 2021, during Tropical Storm Fred, this technology managed to avoid some 5,000 extended customer power outages, saving over 1.2 million minutes of customer interruptions. The previous year, more than 13,000 extended customer power outages were avoided, saving over 1.7 million minutes of customer interruptions during Hurricane Eta.

About 53 percent of Duke Energy Florida customers are served by some form of self-healing or automated restoration technology – this is 14 percent more than in 2020. In less than 10 years, Duke Energy Florida expects to have 80 percent of its customers served by some form of self-healing technology.

Overall, Duke Energy has reduced the average time a customer experiences an outage by approximately 20 percent over the last five years, according to the System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI). Over the next 10 years, Duke Energy Florida will continue to make strategic investments in strengthening its infrastructure and reducing outage times associated with extreme weather events.