North Carolina energy provider Duke Energy has been improving its smart grid ready for the hurricane season.

The company is strengthening its electric infrastructure to reduce outages and improve resiliency, and is urging its customers to take simple steps to prepare homes and businesses for emergencies.

June marks the beginning of the Atlantic hurricane season and it will run till the end of November. Duke Energy meteorologists forecast 20 storms and nine hurricanes for 2021, and the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration forecasts 13 to 20 named storms and six to ten hurricanes.

Duke Energy works all year to prepare for hurricanes and other severe storms and modernise its power delivery system. The improvements increase reliability and resiliency, strengthen the grid against severe weather and hurricanes, and provide for better customer service.

“We’ve been making upgrades across our system to build a stronger and smarter power grid to serve our customers,” said Scott Batson, senior vice president at Duke Energy. “Our crews are ready to respond when the next hurricane strikes. The improvements we have made, and will continue to make, will provide real benefits to customers and communities and help us restore power faster when they count on us most.”

In addition to trimming trees and inspecting and replacing wires and wood poles, the company has invested in grid automation and smart technologies to reduce the duration and number of outages and restore service faster when outages do occur.

Duke Energy’s smart-thinking grid automatically detects outages and intelligently reroutes power to speed restoration or avoid outages altogether.

Self-healing technology helped to avoid nearly 600,000 extended customer outages in North Carolina, South Carolina and Florida in 2020, saving more than one million hours of total outage time. Over the next few years, Duke Energy expects to install enough self-healing technology to serve most of its customers.

After a storm, Duke Energy crews must physically inspect kilometres of power line to ensure everyone’s power is restored. It’s time consuming, but the crews can now use a technology called Ping-it to check remotely that service has been restored following repairs. Ping-it sends a signal to each meter in a few seconds to confirm repairs were successful. This saves time and frees up crews to help other customers.

Duke Energy has installed more than 8.5 million smart meters in six states.

The utility has made changes to the way it responds to major storms to promote the safety of crews and communities during Covid-19. Many of those process modifications and improvements will continue during the 2021 storm season.

The company is encouraging its customers to have a plan in place to respond to an extended power outage after a hurricane or other severe weather. This includes creating an emergency supply kit to save valuable time later. The kit should include everything an individual or family would need for at least two weeks, especially medicines, water, non-perishable foods and other supplies that might be hard to find after a storm hits.

Mobile phones, computers and other electronic devices should be charged in advance of storms to stay connected to important safety and response information. Users should consider purchasing portable chargers.

While residents of coastal areas, including Florida and the Carolinas, are at most risk of being affected by hurricanes, such storms can also bring damaging high winds and rain inland.