By Mara McJilton
Published: Aug. 25, 2022 at 10:46 PM EDT
WILMINGTON, N.C. (WECT) - Thousands of homes and businesses lost power in Wilmington on Wednesday and many people called WECT to find out why.
Power fully restored to customers in Wilmington
A spokesperson for Duke Energy told WECT that there was an equipment failure at the substation on 9th Street and Orange Street. The company has what’s called self-healing technology that automatically re-routes the power to another nearby substation.
“It’s, if you think of it like the GPS in, you’re in your car that identifies an accident ahead and says, ‘take these roads to get around the accident and keep on your way’. That’s what the self-healing technology does automatically. But we also have the ability to manually do switching. And that’s what we were trying to do in the afternoon to get as many customers back on as we could while we completed repairs at the substation,” Jeff Brooks with Duke Energy said.
But once the power was re-routed, there was an outage at that backup substation, causing an even larger number of people to lose power. Brooks said nearly 20,000 people were without power around 5:30 p.m. yesterday.
“It was seven hours or more for some customers and we certainly know that that was unpleasant and uncomfortable and we apologize for that. We’re doing everything we can to understand what happened there so that we can make improvements to help hopefully avoid a similar situation like that anytime soon,” Brooks said. “You know, we have done a lot of improvements in that area around that Ninth and Orange substation, we’ve done upgrades there, and built a number of new technologies on the lines that are coming out of that substation, that’s an area where we’ve been doing a lot of grid improvements, everything from grid-strengthening to poles and wires in that area to adding self healing technology, which was useful in this instance. But, there’s opportunities, as you can see, for us to continue to investigate this and learn from it and make sure that we can help to prevent this type of outage from happening again.”
Brooks said about 20-25% of people in the state have self-healing technologies on their main power lines, and Duke is working to expand that technology to at least 80% of customers in the state over the next few years.
“But the challenge is, is that works best when something happens on the power line somewhere outside the substation, when the problem happens in the substation, it’s a different set of repairs that we have to do. And that’s what our crew was working on. And again, our first priority is to get everybody back restored to power. So we might do a temporary restoration to get everybody back up or switch them to other power lines. And then there may be some follow up repairs we do after the fact which is still being done today as they go in and investigate what really happened,” Brooks said. “The one thing I remind people about is the electric grid is a machine. You know, it’s a machine [that] is designed to work in extreme conditions, it often manages very well through severe weather, but any type of machine can occasionally have an equipment failure or a part failed. We try to build our system to be increasingly resilient so that it can respond to those types of disruptions faster, but there’s still the mechanics that have to be done of going out and making repairs, putting equipment back into service and that’s what we’re finishing up on this project.”
Brooks added that Duke regularly inspects equipment to make sure everything is operating properly.
“And increasingly, we’re installing smart technologies into our substations and on our power lines, that can provide increased monitoring for us. And the goal there is to be able to look at the health of equipment on our system, so that if we begin to see a problem arising, we can schedule a proactive repair that is much shorter than an unexpected repair, or maybe even avoid an outage altogether. And we’re going to see those capabilities increased significantly over the next few years.”
He hopes that this unfortunate situation served as a reminder for all residents to be prepared for any type of power outage whether it be from a big storm or unexpectedly.
“It’s especially important if you rely on electricity for medical needs, we cannot always guarantee that we can get to you to prioritize a restoration if you need, say, electricity for oxygen or other needs like that. So, always knowing what you would do and where you would go if you have to, for those reasons is a very important part of the process. We encourage customers to always use these instances as examples to have that discussion with your family or think about it yourself of ‘what will I do the next time a major storm comes?’ Hopefully the power stays on or our smart technologies will kick in and get your power back quickly, but if they don’t, what can you do to keep your family comfortable? Some of the things that we always say is making sure that you can keep your cell phone charged so you can get updates from Duke Energy or from the news media that you might need to get making sure that you have access to electricity that you may need for medical needs. So, if that means where’s the neighbor you could go to or where is a relative that you could go to and then just making sure you have the things to be comfortable, having some fresh water, having some food on hand, you know, for hurricane season, that’s always a good thing to be thinking about, first aid kits, all of that kind of stuff,” Brooks said.
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