Power outage
 

There has been a power outage in the Sawgrass area. I called duke energy and they said that more than 1000 homes have lost power.

They “expect” power to be restored in 3 hours. No explanation for the outage.

Power has been restored but no explanation for power outage.

Oh, I feel so much better knowing what caused the outage?

A fair amount of construction going on in that area. Likely a line was inadvertently compromised.

Most state regulators don't require the power companies to explain outages to customers, they do require the utility companies to focus on informing the customers on the time to restoration for the customers' planning purposes.

There are ways to find it, but does it really matter, other than curiosity?

When it happened to us about 5 times in a bit over a year it sure did. Got our local assemblyman involved and very quickly outages stopped.

We lost power on a clear day - no storms and no wind. That is very unusual. I have never lost power other than during a major storm.

I - and I think most people - would like to know why the power went out. If we know the reason - was it because of a power line down, poor maintenance, someone throwing the wrong switch at the plant, or because they don't have enough power because of all of the new construction in the Villages and are doing brownouts - we can talk to Duke (and the regulators) and hopefully prevent it from happening again.

Public utilities should be accountable to the public.

Public utilities are accountable to the state regulator, your public representative, other than in TX, which is a third world utility system.

They may not be required to give a reason to the general public, but all outages with reasons are documented with outage time, and restored time, and submitted to the regulator. I checked the outage log at my mom's house here in MA, and the most frequent issue were squirrels. . .

Down in TV, most likely reasons are construction related, as there are no poles to damage with cars. An example of working at the utility company powering our MA house during a storm, we were without power for 48 hours, and I was working storm duty. I asked the transmission engineer in charge of the storm room about it since everyone else was lit up.

The answer was in internal paperwork / pole & transformer blueprints weren't up to date in the library and the contractors couldn't perform the fix needed, and so it was delayed 24 hours to get the correct blue print, and then re-assign internal employees to fix the problem.

Do you really think that SECO is going to admit that to you, the public?

Again, its just your curiosity of abnormality of visible cause which has you wanting an answer. . . and in reality, the cause doesn't really matter, there are hundreds of potential causes of which you can't do anything about.. it just happened because there are hoomans involved again.

After working in the industry, the people are very dedicated to maintaining and fixing the system as quickly as safely possible, as they know the implication of not having electricity -> the world stops working. And safety is a huge concern working with high voltages, and linemen are killed each year when they make a mistake.

Good grief! We lost power for a whopping 20 minutes. This is the first time in the 2.5 years we’ve lived here that our power has gone out. Duke is the most reliable utility that we’ve ever had. I really don’t care why the power went out. What I do care about is that Duke sent out a text message saying that they were aware of the problem before I even opened their app to report the outage. I just can’t imagine getting upset over something so trivial.

Were you affected by the outage?

No, but I was highly concerned about why it happened......not.

I think kenswing covered it quite well, in post #11.

Don't worry if we ever have an EMP the transformers blown will be shipped on a slow boat from China later in the week.

Haven’t been here in awhile, I’m quite surprised by all the snarky answers or is this just the new world?:(