Across the Triad, people dealt with downed trees, flooding, and power outages after Thursday's severe weather and heavy rains.
None of these situations are ideal - but Duke Energy has been working on perfect, expand, and deploy a smart-technology system to restore power faster. Spokesperson Jeff Brooks explains.
"The concept of self-healing technology [is to] automatically detect the outage, and look for other powerlines that it can reroute power to - and then it works to restore power as quickly as it can automatically."
Brooks says the system isn't unlike your GPS when it identifies an accident on your route. Your smart tech might calculate that it's faster for you to take a different path.
Say a tree falls on a line, or a car crashes into a power pole. Instead of knocking out power for potentially thousands - this technology isolates the outage - so it impacts fewer customers.
"That would allow us to restore most of the customers on that line except for those who are closest to where the damage occurred. They might still be out until the repairs are completed," Brooks said, "Oftentimes, in less than a minute we can restore power, and this technology could help reduce the number of customers impacted by as much as 75%."
Brooks says this 'self-healing' technology helps around 20 to 30% of Duke Energy customers across the Carolinas. But, Duke is expanding it, with hopes to cover a majority of those it serves in the next couple of years.
"I do think we will see expanded benefits. When you couple this smart thinking technology with upgrades to poles and wires to make them stronger and more resistant power outages from severe weather, then you begin to get multiple layers of protection," he said, "That should help to reduce some of the numbers of customers impacted by a typical outage that comes with severe storms."
