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Another major weather event, another disastrous response from Charlotte, North Carolina-based Duke Energy. Less than two years after the company dropped the ball spectacularly during a major winter storm, the rate-hiking utility has catastrophically flubbed its response to Hurricane Helene – a major tropical system which pounded Duke’s service area this week with high winds, heavy rains and widespread flooding.
While other utilities – including Richmond-based Dominion Energy – were making steady progress in restoring service to impacted areas across South Carolina, Duke was not.
As of 9:30 a.m. EDT on Saturday (September 28, 2024), Duke had a whopping 591,369 customers without power out of 899,507 total customers tracked in its service area. That’s a whopping 65.7 percent of Duke Energy customers without power, people.
Conversely, Dominion had a reported 193,570 outages out of 820,703 tracked customers – for an outage rage of 23.5 percent.
Duke’s ongoing failure is the main reason why South Carolina – which took less of a blow from Helene than Florida, Georgia or North Carolina – continues to lead the nation in storm-related outages. According to PowerOutage.Us, as of 10:10 a.m. EDT the Palmetto State had more than a million outages – well above Georgia (771K), North Carolina (607K) or Florida (460K).
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3.7 million electric customers remain without power, from #Florida up to #Ohio, due to #HurricaneHelene.
— PowerOutage.us (@PowerOutage_us) September 28, 2024
With 1 million still out in #SouthCarolina and 700k out in #Georgia and #NorthCarolina.
[2024-09-28 9:44 AM EDT]https://t.co/kJ0OPcOSrS#PowerOutages pic.twitter.com/5Ps3cFnDFN
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What is Duke doing about the situation? According to citizens currently in the dark in its most populated South Carolina service area, a whole lot of not much.
“You can’t find a truck,” one Greenville resident told me.
Conversely, sources in the Midlands tell us the area is “crawling” with Dominion responders, who as of Saturday morning had restored power to more than 200,000 customers.
“More than 2,500 employees and contract resources are currently dedicated to storm response,” a statement from the company noted. “More crews are on the way.”
“We’ll continue working, night and day until everyone’s lights are back on,” Dominion added in its statement.
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As for Duke, in a statement issued late Saturday blaming conditions on the ground for impeding its “restoration efforts.”
“Historic flooding, downed trees and road closures are impeding efforts to restore power – particularly in western North Carolina and the Upstate of South Carolina, where outages are most prevalent,” the company noted.
“Even if you don’t see our trucks, we’re still working,” the statement continued. “To restore your power, we sometimes need to repair equipment or damage further up the line before it will be possible to get power to your location.”
Customers were having none of it…
“Duke Energy was not ready for this storm at all,” one responded.
“This is the same thing you put out yesterday,” another stated.
“Same story different day and minimal movement to get power back one,” yet another observed. “Starting to act like a government agency smoke and mirrors.”
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Regular members of our audience will recall Duke recently (and controversially) jacked rates on its poorest Palmetto State customers – part of an ongoing campaign to foist the consequences of poor executive decision-making onto ratepayers who can ill afford such added costs.
As I noted at the time, though, Duke’s short-term issues were nothing compared to the price tag associated with its ongoing catastrophic mismanagement of asset allocation.
“Duke has made terrible decisions regarding its energy mix – decisions which are already costing ratepayers billions of dollars,” I noted in a post prior to its winter storm debacle.
In most “Republican” states, such incompetence would never be tolerated. Sadly, South Carolina leaders continue eagerly accommodating such crony capitalist enabling … no matter how much it costs their citizens.
Count on this media outlet to keep tabs on power restoration efforts in the aftermath of Helene. Hopefully, Duke customers will get some good news soon… but based on the company’s track record, I wouldn’t bet on it.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR…
Will Folks is the owner and founding editor of FITSNews. Prior to founding his own news outlet, he served as press secretary to the governor of South Carolina, bass guitarist in an alternative rock band and bouncer at a Columbia, S.C. dive bar. He lives in the Midlands region of the state with his wife and eight children.
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8 comments
This is a really bad take. WNC and Upstate SC are a mess. We all lost trees. Not downed limbs. Downed trees. Lines laying around everywhere. Trees blocking roads and poles demolished. They are doing an amazing job getting it back up. You see trucks everywhere. They couldn’t get out until yesterday afternoon because of the winds and assessment. There has never been an outage this large before in the area. Columbia and midlands did not get hit like this.
But through it all, despite the best efforts of Duke Energy and many others, the real priorities of South Carolina shine through: Football, in this case Clemson football. Why was the Stanford game not postponed? In the hard-hit Upstate, How many roads that should be open to repair vehicles or first responders will be clogged by football traffic? How many police personnel will be diverted for football security and traffic control? How many flooded out victims will not have hotel rooms because they were reserved for football fans? How many restaurants will be forced to turn away locals because of football fans? There are even reports that many who lost electricity cannot buy ice to keep their dwindling food supply from spoiling because the football fans had bought up all the ice. Pitiful, just pitiful.
Five days and counting without power in Taylors, SC. We have yet to see a single Duke truck on the road, and roads are still blocked by fallen trees (These towns need to invest in road crews or some ROAD CLOSED signs, at least.) All we hear from Duke is the usual PR boilerplate. Climate change has yet to show what it has in store for us. We’ll still have Duke.
This is a familiar story. I used to live in the Oak Grove area of Lexington, about a mile from the Barnyard Flea Market. The area is a weird hodgepodge of different electrical services including Dominion (formerly SCE&Greed) and Mid-Carolina Electric Co-op. At the time I was on Mid-Carolina. Rates were great compared to SCE&G, but getting power on after one of their frequent outages was a nightmare.
Once, during a Winter ice storm, I was listening to their crews on their old UHF conventional radio system. It soon became obvious that 100% of their power restoration effort was being made around their area headquarters on Broad River Rd in the Irmo area. No trucks in West Columbia or Lexington. Nothing. I called MC and asked if customers in the Broad River Rd and Piney Grove Rd area were paying more for electricity than we were in Oak Grove. I was told that they were not. “Then why, I asked, is 100% of you restoration in that area and zero in Oak Grove?” The person on the other end was speechless. I passed this info on to my neighbors, including the MC phone number, and asked them to call and raise hell. About 45 minutes later, trucks began rolling into our area. An hour later, we had power, again.
A few years later, another Winter event. Not an ice storm, just snow. By 7PM, the weak circuit my house was on had succumbed to snow. It was cold in those damn “total electric” homes the power companies hornswoggle people into building and buying, for whatever reason. By the next morning, I was miserable. Tried to call Mid-Carolina as there were no trucks to be found in the area. Rode over to the Irmo area and there were MC trucks aplenty, as I thought. By this time, Mid-Carolina had hidden their live person numbers but a little hacking landed me on the number of the “situations room” at MC, and the live lady working it. This is where they monitor the big electronic map showing areas they service that have power and those that do not. I explained my problem to her and asked that she have a field supervisor call me. I guess he didn’t want to hear it as within thirty minutes, trucks were rolling into third-class customer Oak Grove’s area. In less than an hour, we had power.
The last time I had a lengthy outage, the sneaky bastards at MC had hidden their live-person numbers and hidden them well. I could not hack a live person number as I had done before. Your only option is to call the outage number, where their system records that your number (tied to your address) has an outage. After that it is a case of, “You get fucking power when we are ready to give you fucking power, and not a minute before that!”
I am so glad I no longer live on a MC circuit.
“Regular members of our audience will recall Duke recently (and controversially) jacked rates on its poorest Palmetto State customers – part of an ongoing campaign to foist the consequences of poor executive decision-making onto ratepayers who can ill afford such added costs.”
So it seems like you should be a proponent of Kamala Harris’ corporate price gouging (not controls) plan?
FYI there are still a metric asston of Dominion customers without power…
I agree 100%. Proud living at the coast the response to restore power was more robust than it has been here in the upstate.
Concerning Dominion versus SCE&G. A neighbor told me that it took SCE&G 2 weeks to get the power back on after HUGO. After I moved, I noticed that our power would go out even during a regular thunderstorm. After Dominion took over, they went through my subdivision and made improvements. It took a while, but after they finished, we have seldom had a problem. And, if a problem happened, they were quick to fix it.
This time around, my subdivision and the subdivision beside me lost power at about 4:30 AM during the storm. We all got our power back on yesterday morning around 10:00 AM. One other thing, the Town of Lexington got hit REALLY hard with trees down, etc. It was a major outage for the Town of Lexington, plus those in more rural areas. It’s taking more than just Dominion to get things fixed with contractors helping out as well.
And, then, there are Lexington County Deputies who have been out clearing roads, etc. non-stop in the rural county areas.
All I want to say is that Dominion is FAR, FAR better than SCE&G ever was.
“ In most “Republican” states, such incompetence would never be tolerated.” Haha. What states are you talking about? Set your kool-aid down for just a second and finish your thought. I can’t wait to hear this tale.