Duke Energy says self-healing technology helped New Hanover County customers avoid 19,000 outages in 2026
Wilmington, NC (WWAY) — Duke Energy says its self-healing grid technology has helped customers in New Hanover County avoid about 19,000 outages so far this year.
The company says the technology automatically detects outages and reroutes electricity, allowing service to be restored more quickly or, in some cases, preventing customers from losing power.
According to Duke Energy, the system has saved New Hanover County customers an estimated 31,000 hours of total outage time so far in 2026. During the summer alone, the company says the technology helped avoid about 10,000 customer outages and saved more than 17,000 hours of outage time.
About one-quarter of the summer benefits occurred during major storms, according to the company.
Duke Energy says the technology can reduce the number of customers affected by an outage by as much as 75% and can sometimes restore service in less than a minute.
Last year, the company says the technology helped avoid more than 26,000 customer outages in New Hanover County, saving nearly 50,000 hours of outage time.
Across North Carolina, Duke Energy says nearly 80% of its customers, or about 3 million people, are now served by self-healing technology. That is about 2 million more customers than in 2022.
The technology is part of broader grid improvements Duke Energy says are aimed at improving reliability and storm resilience. Across the Carolinas, the company says it has replaced or upgraded more than 150,000 utility poles, converted about 17,000 wooden transmission poles to steel and trimmed 68,000 miles of vegetation.
Duke Energy says it plans to continue expanding the self-healing technology across North Carolina.
