Duke Energy grid improvements allowed it to limit impact of outages from Hurricane Ian

Prior to Hurricane Ian’s landfall in Florida, Grid improvements helped Duke Energy limit power outages from the storm.

Specifically, the smart, self-healing technology that the company installed helped to automatically restore more than 160,000 customer outages and saved nearly 3.3 million hours of total lost outage time.

“Hurricane Ian is a strong reminder of the importance of grid hardening and storm preparedness to help keep the lights on for our customers,” Melissa Seixas, Duke Energy Florida state president, said. “Self-healing technology is just one of many grid improvements that Duke Energy is making to avoid outages, restore service faster and increase reliability for our customers.”

Self-healing technology is like the GPS you have in your car, but for the grid. The technology can quickly identify power outages and alternate energy pathways to restore service faster for customers when an outage occurs. Further, self-healing technology provides a smart tool to assist crews in the field with power restoration, which reduces outage impacts while freeing up resources to help restore power in other locations.

Three days after Hurricane Ian left Florida, Duke Energy Florida wrapped up the restoration of approximately 1 million customers. As a result, the company was able to deploy more than 550 Duke Energy workers from throughout Florida and contractors from across the country to help restore power for Lee County Electric Cooperative customers.

Crews worked in Cape Coral and Pine Island, one of the hardest-hit areas. They completed power restoration for most customers on Pine Island within about one week.

Duke Energy currently serves around 59 percent of its Florida customers with self-healing capabilities, with the goal of serving about 80 percent over the next few years.