Duke Energy uses self-healing technology to restore power ASAP

When thousands of people lost power during heavy rain and storms on Monday, many people had power restored in about 60 seconds.

It’s because of self-healing technology used by Duke Energy.

The technology finds new lines and routes to get power to homes and businesses in seconds or minutes without a crew having to respond.

Duke Energy spokesperson Jeff Brooks explained how the self-healing technology works.

“The best way I like to describe self-healing technology is like the GPS in your car if you are driving along and your GPS says ‘accident ahead, it may take you longer but it will get you on your route,’” Brooks said. “This is like a GPS for the power grid.

“It automatically identifies an outage and looks for ways to reroute the power, and can get customers up within a minute.”

Brooks estimated about 50% of Duke Energy customers have some benefit from self-healing technology. He said Duke Energy’s goal is to get to 80% served by self-healing technology in the next three to five years.

“[On Monday], we had a rolling outage day,” Brooks said. “We would see several thousand out at any one time. Then, they would be restored.”

Brooks said Monday was not a huge outage day across the state.

“We were fortunate we didn’t see massive numbers during this storm,” Brooks said. “It could’ve been much worse.”

Brooks said Duke Energy’s goal is to restore power faster than ever before.

“When you lose power, it’s more than an inconvenience,” Brooks said. “It shuts down your life.

“We have seen the tolerance decrease. People really want their power back quickly.”