In Florida, as severe weather events strike, whole communities sometimes lose power, and lineworkers, dispatchers and support staff jump into action, working diligently to restore power to residents as quickly and safely as possible.
As last year’s Hurricane Ian swept across the state, Duke Energy Florida’s smart self-healing grid technology was also on the job, helping to restore power faster and limit outages from the storm.
“Much like the GPS in your car can identify an accident ahead and reroute you around the incident to keep you on your way, self-healing technology is like a GPS for the grid,” said Brian Lloyd, Duke Energy general manager of major projects. “The technology can quickly identify power outages and alternate energy pathways to restore service faster for customers when an outage occurs, or even avoid the outage altogether.”
Often, the system enables power to be restored in less than a minute and reduces the number of customers experiencing a power outage by up to 75%.
During Ian, the advanced technology helped to automatically restore more than 160,000 Duke Energy customer outages and saved nearly 3.3 million hours (nearly 200 million minutes) of total lost outage time.
“Self-healing technology is just one of many grid improvements that Duke Energy is making to increase the reliability and resiliency of the grid as a part of the company’s storm protection plan,” said Lloyd. “We have spent the last several years strengthening and upgrading the grid to protect it against severe weather and improve our community’s ability to recover from major storms.”
Although not a new technology and implemented for several years now in Duke Energy’s territory (the company serves around 59% of customers in Florida with self-healing capabilities on its main power distribution lines, with a goal of serving over 80% over the next few years), last year’s Hurricane Ian laid a proving ground for just how powerful and crucial this technology is.
“We were able to restore power to approximately 1 million customers just three days after Ian made landfall,” said Lloyd.
This progress enabled the company to deploy more than 550 Duke Energy workers from throughout Florida, as well as contractors from across the country, to help restore power for customers in a neighboring utility’s territory, Lee County Electric Cooperative.
“We’re all in this together,” said Lloyd. “When it comes to restoring power, this technology enabled us to not only get the lights back on for our customers, but this smart grid is enabling us to help others.”
Prior to Ian in 2022, smart, self-healing technology had helped avoid nearly 250,000 extended customer outages in Florida, saving around 285,000 hours (17.1 million minutes) of total lost outage time.