Duke Energy "sorry" about that cold, dark Christmas weekend

Hot Air ^ | 5 Jan, 2023 | BEEGE WELBORN

[MtnClimber]

Talk about making friends and influencing people. Duke Energy, one of the main power providers for the Carolinas, really stepped in it over the Christmas weekend. For the first time in the energy company’s history, they were forced to institute rolling blackouts and beg their customers to conserve power…in the middle of a ferocious winter storm on Christmas Eve.

For the first time in the company’s history, Duke Energy enacted rolling blackouts on Christmas Eve amid freezing temperatures. The move left half a million customers without power. And on Tuesday, the company issued an apology, attributing several compounding factors as its reasoning.

“I want to express how sorry we are for what our customers experienced. We own what happened,” said Julie Janson, executive vice president and CEO for Duke Energy Carolinas. “Making rotating outages [was] necessary to protect the integrity of the grid and mitigate the risk of serious failure affecting a far greater number of customers for longer time frames.”

…Equipment failure due to severe cold and inaccurate modeling contributed to the outages. Duke said there was extremely high demand and not enough supply of power.

Three of Duke’s power plants — Dan River, Mayo and Roxboro — had to cut its operations in half because instrumentation lines froze, causing Duke to lose 1,300 megawatts of power. This happened despite these lines having weatherization measures.

It turns out the best-laid plans gang aft a-gley when the folks you’ve contracted with to back you up are experiencing the same winter storm and, more importantly, are in the same lousy shape.

…Duke tried to increase its supply by buying power from nearby utility providers, like PJM Interconnection. However, PJM and other companies were having similar problems because of the cold, so that power never came through.

[packagingguy]

Imagine what it will be like when electric cars are foisted on us.

[goodnesswins]

I live among trees...just cut another 17 down...they going to shut down our wood insert?

[Soul of the South]

“What I don’t get is Duke knows how to run in cold weather and has done so for 100 years.”

The current CEO of Duke Energy, Lynn Good, has an accounting and finance background, not an operating background. Her annual compensation is $14 million per year. She has been a strong proponent of solar energy and under her tenure as CEO Duke has made substantial investments in solar. Good came to Duke from the Cinergy, the Ohio electric company Duke acquired a number of years ago.

The Duke executive responsible for electric power in the Carolinas is Julie Janson whose title is Executive Vice President and CEO, Duke Energy Carolinas. Ms. Janson earned a bachelor’s degree in American studies from American University and a law degree from the Cincinnati School of Law. She also began her career at Cinergy, the Ohio electric company, in the law department. She headed the law department at Duke before, as her company biography states, “Previously, Janson served as executive vice president of external affairs and president of Duke Energy’s Carolinas region. In this role, she oversaw the corporate communications, federal government affairs, strategic policy and sustainability functions, stakeholder strategy and the Duke Energy Foundation. In addition, she had responsibility for the performance of the company’s regulated utilities in North Carolina and South Carolina.”

Janson’s company biography describes her current job as, “Julie Janson is executive vice president and chief executive officer for Duke Energy Carolinas. She has responsibility for regulatory and legislative affairs – and for the long-term strategic direction, growth and overall financial performance of Duke Energy’s regulated utilities in North Carolina and South Carolina.”

Notice there is no mention about being responsible for serving the electrical needs of Duke’s customers in the biography. The senior executives running the company have no hands on experience running power plants or electric grids. They are experienced in moving numbers around on a spreadsheet and litigating.

When the United States industrial infrastructure was at its peak in the 1960’s and 1970’s, most CEO jobs were filled by executives who rose to the top through the company’s operations (i.e. they made products) or sales and marketing (i.e they served customers). In the 1970’s financial MBA’s and lawyers began filling the senior executive jobs. The takeover of corporations by financial manipulators resulted in waves of quality reducing cost savings, downsizing and the offshoring of operations in the name of financial efficiency. Short term earnings were boosted to maximize executive bonuses and curry favor with Wall Street speculators. Long term, the US industrial infrastructure was gutted and China became a major supplier and rival to the United States.

Are we seeing the same pattern play out in the utility industry today? Have the experienced operating managers been pushed aside by accountants and lawyers who give themselves huge compensation packages while currying favor with leftist politicians, climate change activists, and woke Wall Street speculators touting ESG?

[nascarnation]

A Southwest airlines employee told me it’s MBA accountants that have refused to invest in anything that didn’t immediately add to the bottom line. Not working well....

[TennesseeGirl]

As widespread as these rolling blackouts were across TVA, Duke Energy, etc., we can only conclude these blackouts (and brownouts) were political rather than from necessity. I’ve lived in the Tennessee Valley for 66 years. We’ve had colder weather for longer periods and never have we had intentional blackouts. So far, TVA has ignored Sen. Tim Burchett’s questions. Par for the course for TVA. After the blackouts ended we definitely had brownouts (they sent very low energy output to the homes). I tried baking a pineapple upside cake for Christmas...it wasn’t fully baked even though I baked it at the same temp for the same length of time as normal...not enough power coming in. I placed a candle on an electric mugwarmer to melt, instead of melting in 30 minutes it still hadn’t completed melted in 2 1/2 hours. I despise these radiofrequency meter boxes they put us on.

[cymbeline]

“because instrumentation lines froze”

That might be true but if they’re electrical lines, how do they freeze?

Could there be instrumentation lines that contain a freezable liquid? Do they mean an overhead line that collected ice and broke?

[John W]

Some instrumentation runs on air and those lines are prone to issues if not kept dry.

[Fellow Traveler]

The frozen lines are probably referring to boiler operations. All boilers use a variety of different pipes that connect pressure and temperature transducers, different supply lines for water and steam. Usually the water and steam are hot enough to keep the lines from freezing. But if it gets cold enough and the lines lack adequate protection they will freeze.

[GOPJ]

The power industry has been brow-beaten, excoriated and besmirched by radical greens for decades now and, as a result, engineers just do not want to work in the power industry. If they do, they want to build windmills, solar cells, and batteries. The average age of workers in coal plants is really old. The vast well of experience operating the plants is drying up. I think the loss of expertise may be what’s at work here.

Excellent analysis... yes, institutional knowledge matters. The lockstep stupid left damages everything they touch. What horrible people.

[bankwalker]

We own what happened,” said Julie Janson, executive vice president and CEO for Duke Energy Carolinas. “Making rotating outages [was] necessary to protect the integrity of the grid and mitigate the risk of serious failure affecting a far greater number of customers for longer time frames.”

If this was necessary then why are you apologizing? Is it because you're just another affirmative action female corporate CEO?

[Tilted Irish Kilt]

RedMonqey :" Whatever it is, it’s affected TVA too.
We had rolling blackouts during the freeze when we never had that before.
During heavy ice storms yes, but just cold, never.
Whatever it is, it’s systematic."

Expect more rolling blackouts; it is symptomatic of a weather ilprepared utility company that lacks a "plan B", which is already over-stretched
Do you know how they plan to overcome the issue ?
They will issue you a remote controlled meter, so that they can turn your power off, by remote.
You no longer control the power in your home ; - they do !

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Exactly right. Instruments and actuators run on 3-15 psi air with 3 psi corresponding to 0% and 15 psi corresponding to 100%. The control logic running power plants up until 30 years ago was all pneumatic, but that has greatly reduced as digital controls took over. The same air powers actuators that move valves, fan dampers and lots of other devices.

Water comes into the "instrument air" via the humidity in the ambient air and it can condense into liquid water when the air expands in the system. Therefore instrumentation air must be kept perfectly dry. This has been well-known in industry for many decades. There are dryer systems on all instrument air systems.

In the old pre-digital days, 3-15 psi pneumatic logic controlled everything in power plants. These were large analog computer systems running on air performing all the calculations needed to run all the subsystems in a power plant.

It is astonishing to me that instrument air is a problem today.

Here is a simple schematic of the basic flapper that provides back pressure on the nozzle.

See "Instrument Air Quality" for more info.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Thanks for pointing that out and I agree that is a MAJOR factor in the changes in the utility industry.

I entered the power industry in 1973 when it was run by engineers. I saw that transformation from leadership by engineers to “leadership” by lawyers and accountants and the horrific changes that wrought.

The change was evident in 1990 when Southern California Edison made John Bryson Chairman and CEO. Before joining Edison, Bryson was a partner in a major law firm. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Stanford University and a law degree from Yale Law School. Bryson co-founded and served as an attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, a radical environmental organization.

He served as president of the California Public Utilities Commission from 1979 to 1982, and before that was chairman of the California State Water Resources Control Board.

I was flabbergasted when he was elevated to Chairman and CEO. This same scenario was played out all over the country.

[cymbeline]

“Instruments and actuators run on 3-15 psi air”

Interesting. Thanks!

Maybe the outages we read about will bring about improvements.

[Soul of the South]

“A Southwest airlines employee told me it’s MBA accountants that have refused to invest in anything that didn’t immediately add to the bottom line. Not working well....”

Only works out for their own pocketbooks. CEO and senior executive pay has grown to astronomical heights since the 1980’s as companies moved to hiring outside MBA’s and financial CEO’s instead of promoting from within. Their pay packages are heavily weighted toward huge bonuses and large stock option grants. The bonuses, usually based on earnings per share, can be affected by large share buybacks which reduce the number of shares and thereby increase earnings per share. The stock options benefit from increases in the stock price. The stock price can be boosted through financial manipulation such as stock buybacks, cutting product quality, and selling off assets, reducing R&D expenditures and outsourcing which temporarily increases earnings but long term guts the company of productive assets.

Given the average CEO in the United States has a tenure of 3 years, CEO’s are highly focused on maximizing the value of their compensation package at the long term expense of the company they likely will be leaving within 2-3 years.

[RedMonqey]

It’s the same thing going on in California and Western Europe. They’re using energy and food to control the populace.

It won’t be cattle cars this time around.

[RedMonqey]

I’m not usually a conspiracy type of guy but this stinks to high heaven.
Incompetence could explain a few of these happening but this being this widespread gets my BS meter hitting red.
The rush, or rather the push to green energy has shown it’s cracks for time enough for smart people to take note. Ignorance cannot be an excuse so that leaves the last answer.

[VeniVidiVici]

TO ELECTRIFY!!!!!

[minnesota_bound]

I would think solar energy is the answer.
Just use the sun’s rays to defrost the equipment.....

[BobL]

“That might be true but if they’re electrical lines, how do they freeze? Could there be instrumentation lines that contain a freezable liquid? Do they mean an overhead line that collected ice and broke?”

Sure, they can carry air (or gas) or liquids, to a remote gauge. Certainly that’s how it was done in the old days, and did have the advantage of not requiring power to operate (as is required if you do the measurement locally).