During the week leading up to Christmas, weather forecasters began predicting a cold Christmas, which is unusual considering average highs in our area during December are normally in the low 50s. To make things even more challenging, the cold front was going to be preceded by high winds.

Well, the forecast was spot-on. Our service area began experiencing high winds Friday morning, Dec. 23, 2022, causing over 50 separate outages affecting over 3,000 Pee Dee Electric members. Our employees worked diligently throughout the day and evening to restore power in high winds and plummeting temperatures.

With power restoration efforts behind us, something unprecedented happened just after sunrise on Christmas Eve. Cooperative staff received notification to implement our Customer Owned Generation Program and reduce the load in the Duke Energy Carolinas part of our service territory. This territory consists of southwest Anson County and the areas we serve in Union and Stanly counties. We were given a certain amount of load to shed, and we quickly put into action a plan to rotate outages in those areas to minimize the impact of the outages on our members, especially considering the extremely cold temperatures that morning. Duke Energy implemented a similar plan of rolling blackouts throughout their service areas across the state.

During and after this event, members have asked several questions — some I can answer, and some are yet to be determined.

Why was it necessary to implement rolling blackouts, especially considering how cold it was?

The general answer is that the frigid temperatures caused unexpectedly high demand for electricity throughout the Carolinas and the Southeast. To prevent the entire Southeastern electric grid from possibly collapsing, demand response programs, customer-owned generation programs and rolling blackouts were implemented to reduce load on the system. If the Southeastern grid had shut down, it would have taken a significant amount of time to restore electricity across the Southeastern United States. It was better to have smaller, controlled outages of shorter durations than a long, extended outage had the grid shut down.

Why wasn’t Pee Dee Electric prepared for the high demand?

Actually, our distribution system held up very well to the high demand for electricity caused by the cold temperatures on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. The rolling blackouts were the result of not having enough generation available to serve the high demand for electricity. This was impacted by several generating plants operating below maximum capacity due to equipment malfunctions. Normally, there would be generating capacity available from other utilities and independent power producers, but excess capacity was not available due to the cold weather affecting the entire Southeast.

Why were members not notified of the need for rolling blackouts earlier?

The need for rolling blackouts and implementing the Customer Owned Generation program happened quickly. Pee Dee Electric received the request for an emergency load shed and implementation of our Customer Owned Generation Program at 7:24 a.m. Saturday morning and had to act immediately. We notified members as quickly as we could through social media.

What is being done to prevent this from happening again?

The answer to this question hasn’t fully been determined yet. Duke Energy (and other utilities that had performance issues during the cold weather) are gathering information to determine what lessons can be learned and develop strategies to reduce the possibility of a similar event occurring in the future. In addition, there are inquiries and investigations by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), the North Carolina Utilities Commission (NCUC), and Governor Cooper’s office about the event. I am confident any areas of concern will be identified and addressed by Duke Energy and other generators.

I want to thank our members for their patience and understanding during our power restoration efforts on the Friday before Christmas. Our employees worked very hard to restore power as safely and quickly as possible. Unfortunately, it takes time to work through over 50 separate outages.

I also want to thank our dedicated employees who worked tirelessly to restore power throughout the day Friday and employees that organized and successfully implemented a load-shedding plan very quickly on Christmas Eve morning.

I am especially thankful to the members impacted by the load-shedding outages and those who took extra steps to conserve energy to help prevent more widespread outages during this unprecedented event.