RALEIGH, NC – In the wake of rolling blackouts that resulted in power outages for more than 200,000 residents, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper is demanding detailed answers from Duke Energy.
Yesterday, Cooper Tweeted:
“Duke Energy assures me NC is in the clear now. But I’m deeply concerned about people who lost power and who didn’t get notice about rotating outages. Grateful for those who conserved energy. I’ve asked Duke for a complete report on what went wrong for changes to be made.”
Heavy demand across the nation due to freezing temperatures impacted Duke Energy’s ability to import power from neighboring regions, which typically serve as a backup source for energy. Duke did tap into solar energy during the initial wave of blackouts, but it wasn’t sufficient to cover the exceptionally-high demand.
Duke Energy spokesperson Jeff Brooks explained “When we made the difficult decision to take these temporary outages, they were done in a fairly fast order. So that work happened at a pace that didn’t allow us to be as proactive in our communications as we’d typically be on other types of planned outages. This was sort of an emergent event. So I would say we did not get to communicate as well as we would like to with customers on the front end, but we did try to provide information when we could during the event. And I think there’s opportunities for us there to go back and look at that and see are there other things that we can do going forward to help improve that process, just as will look at this entire event to figure out what things can be added to our plans and our processes to help either avoid this in the future or to improve that process.”
Since 2004, O’Hern has worked with political campaigns in roles ranging from major projects involving nationwide digital marketing for U.S. Presidential candidates, U.S. Congressmen, state governors, and state representatives. O’Hern’s journalism background includes news reporting and editing for various organizations and news publications in Alabama and Florida since 2002. O’Hern graduated from Samford University in Birmingham, Ala with a degree in journalism and a minor in political science.