9 Investigates tools to identify areas susceptible to power outages

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — In Charlotte, miles and miles of power lines crisscross the city and only occasionally do homes lose power more than once or twice a year. That is, unless you live in a few small pockets like Sherwood Forest in Cotswold, where longtime resident Patsy Richardson has had a completely different experience.

"I've lived here for a long time and I know it is very susceptible to power outages. Sometimes it just seems to be no rhyme or reason. It just goes," Richardson said.

For Sherwood Forest and parts of other neighborhoods scattered across Charlotte, including a one square block area between Hillside and Tranquil Avenue near Park Road shopping center, outages are averaging more than six per year even though the vast majority of homes in the Duke system lose power no more than twice a year.

For years, though, Duke Energy was largely unaware of the tiny areas that were having the most repeat problems because Duke Energy officials who measure reliability traditionally used system averages.

That changed last spring when a customer question about outages ended up on the desk of a Duke vice president. He tasked a team of computer analysts with turning reams of outage data into a visual map for every house in the Duke system.

Sasha Weintraub is the man who had that idea. The result, just finished in January and shown to executives including Duke CEO Lynn Good, is a searchable map with green and yellow patches showing areas with the fewest problems and red dots representing the most outages scattered in small pockets across the Duke service area.

Weintraub said the new approach is producing a major change in the way Duke is approaching customers losing power most often.

"We can now look at a specific neighborhood and say something's not right there. We need to change that experience for that neighborhood, for that customer," he said.

As a result, Duke's decisions on where and when to trim trees, whose falling branches are the biggest cause of outages, are now being driven by data from the new maps instead of what had been a planned rotation for trimming in all neighborhoods.

Based on the new maps, some areas will now be trimmed more frequently and others less often.

Ironically, last week, when storms raced across Charlotte, power went out again in Sherwood Forest, despite trees having been trimmed last year. Weintraub said he's determined to keep a closer eye on that area, and others where power goes out often, and to look for other options if outages continue to occur after tree trimming has taken place.

"If that doesn't work and it still shows up as 'red' on the Duke outage maps ... do we accelerate other tools?" Weintraub said. "Like underground power lines in a particular neighborhood.  Maybe feeding in a second circuit so if one goes down there's a back feed in a different way."

Weintraub says the idea is to minimize outages in areas that have the most frequent reliability issues.

For Al Riddick, a Sherwood Forest resident whose house is one of those "red dots," the prospect of fewer outages, after years of frustration, is encouraging.

"Absolutely," he said. "I'd love to have more reliable service."

Cox Media Group