Dive Brief:
- South Carolina electric utilities have come through historic flooding largely unscathed, Platts reports, with only minimal outages remaining.
- All of the utilities' hydroelectric dams performed as designed, with some spilling out large amounts of water, and the rains had only a small impact on non-hydro generation.
- Though most outages had been restored, Duke Energy Progress said that across the duration of the storm, about 500,000 customers lost power.
Dive Insight:
With the memories of Hurricane Sandy in mind, electrical utilities braced for a similar scenario from Hurricane Joaquin up and down the east coast. Now that the clouds have cleared, South Carolina appeared the hardest hit with Reuters reporting at least15 dead from historic flooding, though utilities say they came through the storm fairly unscathed.
Duke Energy Progress restored power to about 500,000 customers, and other utilities say their systems weathered the storms as well.
South Carolina Electric & Gas said that as of yesterday its crews "remain focused on assessing flood damage and safely restoring customers power. We are also now able to work normal service requests as well." The utility had reported about 11,500 outages during the storm.
Though Santee Cooper said its dams and dikes had remained secure, the utility two days ago was forced to begin spilling operations through six primary spillway gates at the Santee Dam. It was releasing about 375,000 gallons of water per second into the Santee River, in order to control water levels.
A Santee Cooper spokesperson told Platts that it did face some issues during the storm at its 1,130-MW Winyah coal station, but that the utility had ample capacity in part because of lower-than-normal demand.