Self Healing Technology

We're building a smart-thinking grid that will help increase efficiency and quality of service, prepare the grid for cleaner energy options, and restore power outages faster than ever.

To better serve customers when power outages occur, Duke Energy uses smart, self-healing technology that can automatically detect power outages and quickly reroute power to restore service faster or avoid the outage altogether.

We're adding groundbreaking technologies, such as remote sensors and monitoring, as well as advanced communication systems that deliver real-time information from thousands of points along the grid. This information allows the grid to make real-time decisions to keep power reliable.

While a self-healing system can't repair the physical damage to the power line that a human crew must repair, it can help to limit the number of customers who experience an extended outage because of the damage.

Benefits

• Reduces the number of customers affected by a power outage by up to 75%
• Isolates problem areas for quicker response and shorter outages for customers
• Can often restore power in less than a minute
• Improves grid resiliency and ability to recover from major storms and events
• Helps achieve a cleaner, lower-carbon future by enabling the sustainable growth of renewable energy and distributed technologies, like battery storage and microgrids

Building a self-healing system

We are installing self-healing technology along our main power lines in communities across the states we serve. Over the next few years, we hope to serve most customers by some form of self-healing capability. Most of that work will take place on main overhead power lines, but some work will take place in underground vaults in urban areas or along underground lines.

Crews will install a variety of improvements including automatic sensors and communication equipment, control boxes on poles, switching equipment and reclosers that can automatically restore power (like the breaker in your house) or reroute power to other power lines. In some cases, new power lines or poles will need to be built. This equipment helps improve response and speed power restoration when an outage occurs, like a tree falling on a line or a car hitting a pole.