Duke Energy's $1.26B grid-improvement plan for North Carolina slowed by pandemic

Duke Energy Progress LLC and Duke Energy Carolinas LLC told North Carolina regulators that a nearly $1.26 billion three-year grid-improvement plan is moving "slower than initially planned."

The Duke Energy Corp. subsidiaries said the plan — intended to help avoid outages, secure the grid and restore power faster — has lagged because the COVID-19 pandemic slowed the regulatory approval process in 2020 and affected the supply chain and workforce availability.

The companies said cumulative capital expenditures totaled about $323 million for Duke Energy Carolinas and about $145 million for Duke Energy Progress through 2021, roughly 35% lower than the cumulative planned expenditures for 2020-21, according to a plan update filed with the North Carolina Utilities Commission on March 1. (Docket Nos. E-7, Sub 1214 and E-2, Sub 1219B)

Because of those delays, the companies said there is a risk of some of the work extending beyond the Dec. 31, 2022, deferral end date, which could lead to underspending on the nearly $1.26 billion originally estimated for Jan. 1, 2020, to Dec. 31, 2022, according to the filing.

Work so far has been completed, overall, at a cost on track with original estimates. "[W]e are, however, closely watching inflationary concerns that could put pressure on our ultimate costs," the utilities said.

The plan includes automated self-healing grid technologies aimed at improving reliability and reducing outage times, voltage control to conserve energy, upgrades to better protect and monitor the transmission grid, improved energy distribution tools, and a program to boost cybersecurity.

Customers are already seeing some of the benefits of those improvements, the utilities said. Self-healing improvements to the grid helped avoid about 210,000 extended customer outages in North Carolina in 2021. During winter storms in the Carolinas on Jan. 3 and Jan. 16, the self-healing technology, which the Duke Energy utilities referred to as the "Self-Optimizing Grid program," helped avoid 41,600 extended outages in North Carolina.

So far, the companies have installed enough self-healing technology to serve about 14% of Duke Energy Carolinas customers and about 34% of Duke Energy Progress customers in North Carolina, the utilities said.