Old North News

Gov. Roy Cooper (D-NC) is asking power companies to account for the rolling blackouts they put in place during the holiday weekend cold spell.

Thousands of North Carolinians experienced purposeful power outages as an Arctic blast pushed through the area last weekend, but Duke Energy said the rolling blackouts ultimately prevented more outages.

“The extreme cold resulted in some challenges across the system in being able to meet customers' energy needs,” Duke Energy spokesperson Jeff Brooks told CBS17.com earlier this week. “And that resulted in the need to take a very unusual and emergency step of taking some controlled temporary outages across the system.” 

Some 200,000 customers were without power part of the day Friday after strong wind and storms knocked out power in some areas, especially near Charlotte. The number dropped to 40,000 by nightfall, but the cold temperatures forced Duke and other power companies to implement rolling blackouts.

While those outages left more customers in the dark, the company says it was done with precision, as some workers watched grid performance while others repaired lines.

“The system will look for where it has needs for energy,” Brooks told CBS17.com. “It will look for where it can take a temporary outage to free up that energy to serve other customers so that we don’t have more outages.” 

Duke also asked customers to minimize power usage Sunday (Christmas) night in what the utility company said would be the last request made in connection with this weather event.

“Unfortunately, the need occurred very quickly, so that was why we couldn’t do as much proactive communication as we typically would,” Brooks said, according to CBS17.com. “I know that was frustrating for some customers, but we were really working as quickly as we could to keep the grid protected and maintain reliability.” 

Cooper has asked for a full report from Duke Energy on what went wrong and what changes will be made to the grid to prevent similar responses in the future.