Ensuring reliable electricity service is a top priority for electric companies. Storms and other severe weather events present reliability challenges, but electric companies have developed innovative techniques to prevent and reduce service interruptions.

Duke Energy Florida, which serves a region that often is impacted by powerful hurricanes, harnesses the power of automation as part of its storm protection plan. The electric company is deploying smart, self-healing technology to limit outages in Florida. 

This technology automatically detects power outages and quickly reroutes power to restore service faster, or even avoid the outage altogether. Often, this system enables power to be restored in less than a minute. It’s a valuable tool to improve energy grid resilience and the ability to recover from major storms.

In 2021, the technology helped avoid nearly 250,000 extended customer power outages in Florida, saving customers almost 17 million minutes of time without electricity. That year, during Tropical Storm Fred alone, this technology managed to prevent about 5,000 extended power outages, saving more than 1.2 million minutes of power outages.

“We are working hard to deliver electricity that is reliable, increasingly clean, and more secure,” Duke Energy Florida State President Melissa Seixas said. “We know that storms are increasing in frequency and intensity, so it’s important that we take steps today to protect the grid from the impacts of severe weather and increase reliability for all our customers.”

About 53 percent of Duke Energy Florida customers are served by some form of self-healing or automated restoration technology – 14 percent more than in 2020. In less than 10 years, Duke Energy Florida expects to have 80 percent of its customers served by some form of self-healing technology.

Overall, Duke Energy has reduced the average time a customer experiences an outage by approximately 20 percent over the last five years, according to the System Average Interruption Duration Index. Over the next 10 years, Duke Energy Florida will continue to make strategic investments in strengthening its infrastructure and reducing outage times associated with extreme weather events.

Visit Duke Energy’s website to learn more about self-healing technology.

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