Power was restored Friday morning to more than 4,000 customers of Duke Energy in the East Asheville area.
The problem reportedly was related to a faulty substation.
Duke Energy said 4,600 customers were without power at one point in the early morning hours.
This explanation seems inadequately vague. At least parts of this morning’s outage area were also powerless for about 15 hours beginning on the morning of the record cold a few weeks ago. These outages corresponded with what would have been periods of highest demand on the local grid. On both occasions those affected were told by robocall that the problem was “transmission lines.”
This morning’s Duke/Progress power outage map showed the existence of large outage areas in both the Western and Eastern NC territories formerly served by Progress Energy. By way of contrast, sections of North Carolina historically served by Duke reported several small or single customer outages but no major disruptions anywhere in that territory.