CINCINNATI — Duke Energy employs operators that work 24/7, 365 in case of an outage or emergency that could shut electricity off.
Operators will be alerted from the call center or be alerted through their systems that monitor outages, according to the company.
Mike Simms, a grid engineering manager for Duke, told WCPO 9 that the team of operators are put through months of training so they can handle the systems, which is said are equipped with strong physical and electronic security.
Duke has also made significant technological advancements to their outage operations, including the company's "self-healing" technology.
Simms said the new technology would allow for customers that would usually be part of an outage to be shifted to an alternate circuit, which would restore service faster.
"For the customers that get resorted in that alternate circuit, instead of a four-hour outage, they'd be back in two minutes," Simms said.
Simms explained the technology with a hypothetical scenario with a tree falling.
"With this technology, it will sense that there's a fault there, a tree had fell there," he said. "It will open that up and open that up, segment that to a small number of customers. And this device in that section, the substation will close in and feed the customers back."
One of the major causes of outages is severe weather events, including rain, winds and snot. Duke told WCPO 9 that heat can also cause an outage.
"Heat can cause an outage, because everybody's electricity is working harder at their home with the air conditioning units running longer and higher," said Frank Duell, an operator at Duke Energy.
When a weather event does happen, though, Duke said it's all hands on deck.
"We mobilize, essentially, our crews in the field to do the restoration work and we mobilize our operators to respond to those," Simms said.
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