Duke Energy built solar in a mountain town to improve reliability. Helene was its biggest test.

HOT SPRINGS, N.C. — Nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains, just off the Appalachian trail, the resort town of Hot Springs is as beautiful as it is remote, and that mountain life comes with its own challenges.

Genia Hayes-Peterson, who spent decades serving hikers and locals alike at the Smoky Mountain Diner in downtown Hot Springs, said she’s lived the ups and downs.

“Because of where the electricity came over the mountains it was pretty frequent that we lost power,” she said.

Powering Hot Springs

Getting power to Hot Springs relies on one 10-mile distribution line that travels from the substation in Marshall through the Pisgah National Forest, according to Jason Handley, Duke Energy’s General Manager of the Distributed Energy Group.

That leaves the town vulnerable, not just to outages, but prolonged outages.

Handley said the utility considered building a second distribution line, but given the distance, logistics and environmental concerns of building in the forest, the projected costs didn’t seem financially viable. Instead, Duke Energy proposed a microgrid pilot project.

“It gave us a great opportunity to test this technology,” he said.

Microgrids are a type of small-scale power generating system that can operate both on the grid and independently. In the event of an emergency, the microgrid has the opportunity to “island itself” or disconnect from the greater grid and provide the power it generates locally.

In the case of Hot Springs, Duke Energy chose to build an all-renewable grid, with a 2 MW solar array and 4.4 MW of on-site battery power. The solar charges the batteries. When the microgrid is islanded off, the batteries power downtown Hot Springs.

Using the grid

Constructing the grid cost $14.5 million, according to Handley. It was a far lower price point than building a new distribution line, with a far lower environmental impact. As for the reliability benefits, Handley said since the grid came online in 2023, it’s had one major test prior to Hurricane Helene.

In April 2023, a windstorm ripped through the mountains cutting off power to Hot Springs. Handley said, Duke Energy, which operates the microgrid remotely, didn’t see it island off automatically, but was able to fix the issue quickly after the storm ended.

“We came to the site quickly and we figured out what the problem was and we manually started the microgrid and it was able to provide power to the town in the way that we originally designed it to do,” he said.

Handley said that first event taught the utility a few lessons about the remote control and what the grid was capable of, so when Helene hit, both Duke and the town had a better idea of what to expect.

Hurricane Helene

On September 27, the remnants of the storm dumped more than a foot of rain in some parts of the North Carolina mountains flooding the rivers and creeks.

Amanda Arnett watched the Spring Creek rise up in downtown Hot Springs that morning.

“I literally made it over the bridge onto the home side with minutes to spare before it started coming over the bridge into town,” she said.

The water rushed into downtown washing away parts of the street and submerging several businesses. Arnett’s Spring Creek Tavern saw severe flooding and lost part of its wall.

“This looks like a war zone,” she said.

Ten miles away, the Marshall substation sustained significant damage knocking out power to thousands in Madison County, including Hot Springs.

Getting the lights back on

In the immediate aftermath of Helene, Duke Energy lost contact with its Hot Springs microgrid. Handley said the utility had to work with the mayor and NCDOT to find a way to navigate washed out and damaged roads to get into town and find out how the microgrid was doing.

Handley said they arrived Sept. 30, found the batteries at the microgrid were depleted and that downtown needed a few structural repairs before power could be reconnected.

By Oct. 2, the batteries were recharged and the buildings that could receive power downtown started to get electricity from the microgrid and Handley said it stayed that way, operating independently until Duke Energy was able to replace the damaged Marshall substation with a temporary unit.

“From the time we closed in at 10:30 a.m. Oct. 2, until the mobile weas installed at 10 a.m. on [Oct.] 8th, the downtown did not lose power,” he said. “We powered it completely on solar and batteries.”

Had it not been for the microgrid, Handley said Hot Springs would have spent at least another week in the dark. He added that every day the grid operated, Duke learned more ways to stretch the efficiency of the grid.

“Every day we got a little further and further not out of the safe zone, we pushed it a little bit further to ensure that we could maximize the amount of time that our load segments were able to stay on,” he said.

Reopening Hot Springs

When the water receded and she was able to make it to town, Hayes-Peterson learned she was one of the lucky ones. Her building was still standing, she had no flood damage inside, the only issue was the lack of stock needed to reopen.

“We just lost food because we had no electricity,” she said.

Once power came back, she said she had to wait for a health inspection and find a delivery truck that could make it to Hot Springs, but Hayes-Peterson felt it was important to reopen as soon as possible.

“Everybody needed to get back to work,” she said. “I mean everybody depends on their paycheck.”

The diner was back up and running by Oct. 7, and while Hayes-Peterson said she’s not seeing anywhere near her typical fall crowd, she’s been grateful to see a return to normalcy.

“We’re blessed,” she said. “We went home to our families. We went home to our homes. A lot of people didn’t.”

Arnett meanwhile said the Spring Creek Tavern and several other downtown businesses closer to the French Broad and the creek will likely take months of recovery. She’s hoping her business can start operating by mid-March.

“We’re hustling,” she said. “There’s gonna be a lot of reconstruction, rebuilding.”

The future of microgrids and resiliency

While it wasn’t able to keep the power running continuously, Handley considers the Hot Springs grid response a success, especially considering the damage to the community.

“Microgrids are a great technical solution for communities like Hot Springs,” he said. “Areas I’m going to consider more rural that have potential reliability problems that have load centers targeted near the end of a long feeder line.”

In the wake of Hurricane Helene, clean energy advocates have called for utilities and emergency response plans to include proactively building more microgrids like this one, to improve reliability in disaster response.

Handley said it’s something Duke is considering, particularly in Florida at schools and sites that can serve as potential hurricane shelters. Still, given the cost of these projects, he’s not sure it’s a one-size-fits-all solution.

“Sometimes it works out, sometimes there’s a better solution,” he said.

(VIDEO: How Microgrids can make the rural energy grid more resilient and sustainable)

How Microgrids can make the rural energy grid more resilient and sustainable

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