North Charlotte Today

Thousands of North Carolinians experienced purposeful power outages in the midst of the extreme cold that pushed through the area over the holiday weekend.

The rolling blackouts were intended to prevent more widespread outages.

“The extreme cold resulted in some challenges across the system in being able to meet customers' energy needs,” Duke Energy spokesperson Jeff Brooks told CBS17.com earlier this week. "And that resulted in the need to take a very unusual and emergency step of taking some controlled temporary outages across the system.” 

About 200,000 customers were in the dark on Friday after strong wind and storms knocked out power in some areas. The number went down to 40,000 by nightfall, but the cold temperatures remained, forcing Duke and other power companies to implement rolling blackouts.

While whose outages took out power to many more customers, the company says it was done with precision as a group of workers watched grid performance while others repaired lines.

“The system will look for where it has needs for energy,” Brooks told CBS17.com. “It will look for where it can take a temporary outage to free up that energy to serve other customers so that we don’t have more outages.” 

The final request from Duke Energy to its customers was to have them conserve energy on Sunday (Christmas) night. According to Duke workers, that was the last time that request was made in connection with this weather event.

“Unfortunately, the need occurred very quickly, so that was why we couldn’t do as much proactive communication as we typically would,” Brooks said, according to CBS17.com. “I know that was frustrating for some customers, but we were really working as quickly as we could to keep the grid protected and maintain reliability.” 

Gov. Roy Cooper (D-NC), meanwhile, has asked for a full report from Duke Energy on what went wrong over the weekend and what changes will be made to the grid moving forward.