Duke Energy Florida
As Florida enters another hurricane season, Duke Energy Florida is reminding customers about the benefits of its smart, self-healing technology to help combat power outages during storms. Much 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.
Last year, this technology helped avoid approximately 513,000 extended customer power outages in Florida, saving more than 3.8 million hours of total lost outage time.
“We’re working hard to improve reliability for our customers, strengthen the grid against severe weather and enhance our response after a major storm,” said Melissa Seixas, Duke Energy Florida state president. “The back-to-back storms we experienced last hurricane season serve as strong reminders of the importance of this grid-strengthening work and how these investments continue to benefit customers during power outages.”
Self-healing technology also provides a smart tool to assist crews in the field with power restoration after a major storm, helping reduce outage impacts and freeing up resources to help restore power in other locations. Currently, more than 60 percent of Duke Energy Florida customers are served by some form of self-healing or automated restoration technology, a 45-percent increase as compared to 2020.
Over the years, self-healing technology has provided tremendous benefit to Florida customers during times when Duke Energy experienced major outages on its system due to severe weather. In a few years, Duke Energy Florida expects to have at least 80 percent of its customers served by some form of self-healing technology.
In 2022 in Jefferson County, use of this technology resulted in avoiding 14,600 extended customer outages and saved 17,100 hours of interruption. Visit www.duke-energy.com to view Duke Energy Florida’s 2022 self-healing technology data county by county.
Duke Energy Florida, a subsidiary of Duke Energy, owns 10,500 megawatts of energy capacity, supplying electricity to 1.9 million residential, commercial and industrial customers across a 13,000-square-mile service area in Florida.
Duke Energy (NYSE: DUK), a Fortune 150 company headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., is one of America’s largest energy holding companies. It is executing an aggressive clean energy transition to achieve its goals of net-zero methane emissions from its natural gas business by 2030 and net-zero carbon emissions from electricity generation by 2050.