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Duke Energy outlines fall upgrades, cites vegetation as main cause of outages
Summary
Duke Energy told Harrison City Council and residents on April 3 that installing new remote isolation devices this fall should shrink outage footprints and speed restoration; company officials said vegetation — especially dying ash trees — is the leading cause and pledged to follow up on neighborhood outage reports.
Nick Malolo, manager of the Power Quality and Reliability Group for Duke Energy covering the Ohio and Kentucky territory, told the Harrison City Council on April 3 that the utility plans to install new remote isolation devices this fall to break circuits into smaller segments and reduce the number of customers affected by single outages.
"The number 1 cause of the outages is vegetation," Malolo said, explaining that in many cases trees or branches contact lines and that Duke uses a combination of four‑year full circuit trims, five‑year line patrols and 10‑year pole inspections to find and mitigate risks. He added that the new devices will allow the system to communicate and reroute power more quickly, though residents may see brief flickers as devices perform fault isolation and reenergization.
The presentation explained other causes of outages — equipment failure, planned work and…
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