Duke Energy prepares for the 2019 hurricane season

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RALEIGH (WTVD) — Duke Energy says they’re prepared for hurricane season with new technology that will keep you from being without power for long.

“You can imagine when you’re in a storm–this area just becomes really crazy with all the outages they’re managing,” said Jeff Brooks, communications manager with Duke Energy.

In the control center, dispatchers will immediately be alerted to an outage and the call goes out, which dispatches a crew to fix the problem.

“What you see behind me are crews actually working with our line techs in the field assigning them to jobs. Often times outages that have occurred,” Brooks said.

And technology is helping as well.

“We can actually remotely ping these meters from this facility and determine whether a home or business has been properly repaired,” Brooks explained.

About 95 percent of Raleigh and all of Durham have smart meters. Now, Duke Energy is working to add self-healing technology throughout the state, too.

“The smart-thinking technology will automatically be able to detect when a tree or another object causes an outage on a line and then look for options to reroute power nearly instantly so we can get as many customers back on as possible,” he said.

Preparing for the worst and hoping for the best just in time for hurricane season.

The new self-healing technology already came in handy during Hurricane Florence. It helped avoid extended outages for about 80,000 people.

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