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by Itinease McMiller
ASHEVILLE, N.C. (WLOS) — As temperatures drop and people begin to turn up the heat, the demand for electricity is expected to rise across western North Carolina. Duke Energy said new technology at its Asheville Energy Complex is helping the company prepare for increased demand while working to keep electricity reliable and costs down for customers.
Duke Energy recently brought a new solar and battery storage facility into service at its Asheville Energy Complex, marking another step in the site's transformation from a coal-fired power plant into a modern energy facility.
The complex now uses a combination of natural gas, solar power, and battery storage to provide electricity to more than half a million homes across the region.
The solar facility can generate enough electricity to power approximately 5,000 homes. With winter approaching, Duke Energy says energy storage will play an important role in meeting the region's energy needs.
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"Energy storage is a battery, so when you think about it, you can actually store energy in these. So if solar panels capture that energy from the sun, or if our combined cycle plant creates energy that we don't use, which happens a lot, we've got this excess energy the battery can store, and so we can use these batteries to deploy extra energy onto our grid in the winter season," said Logan Stewart with Duke Energy.
Having multiple energy sources also gives Duke Energy more flexibility in how it generates electricity, particularly when fuel prices fluctuate.
"We know that bills and costs are important to customers, and that's something customers are thinking about every day," Stewart said. "So having a diverse mix of energy resources for us to pick and choose what we use across our system, that ultimately drives down cost across the system and helps us operate more reliably, and that can drive down cost for customers."
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Beyond producing and storing electricity, Duke Energy said it is also using technology to help restore power more quickly when outages occur. One example is what the company calls smart self-healing technology.
"For customers on a line that experiences an outage, it can reroute them to another line. We've integrated that across a lot of our grid on our main distribution lines."
The technology is designed to limit the number of customers affected by certain outages and help restore electricity without requiring crews to manually switch power to another line.
Duke Energy says the natural gas portion of the facility has reduced emissions by approximately 60% since 2020 and operates more efficiently than the former coal plant.
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