Duke Energy plans to rebuild three of its substations in western North Carolina after Helene’s catastrophic damage.
One of the substations that was completely destroyed by Helene’s flooding is near Biltmore Village in Asheville.
“What we’re seeing here is a war zone,” said Duke Energy Spokesman Bill Norton in late October.
Biltmore Village is a historic neighborhood just south of downtown Asheville. Its quaint, charming buildings with hotels and local shops look like old English stuccoed cottages. Usually around this time of year, the area would be bustling with tourists admiring the holiday decorations.
Instead, there are construction crews vacuuming layers of caked mud inside buildings. Maintenance workers in hazmat suits push wheelbarrows of trash to commercial-sized dumpsters overflowing with waste. The iconic “fancy” McDonald’s — known for its chandeliers and grand piano — now sits abandoned with litter poking out of broken windows.
A few blocks away is Swannanoa River Road, where Duke Energy’s substation is located about half a mile down the road from a roadblock. The area is closed to the public because of severe damage.
At the substation site, Norton described the facility’s important role in getting power to customers.
“This is a critical junction that allows that high power to be throttled down to lower power that can be safely distributed to residences and businesses,” he said.
Three units make up this particular substation. Two of them were destroyed during Helene, including one built in the early 1970s before FEMA flood maps were widely used, and another that was outside the 100 year flood plain, but still flooded.
The last unit is a mobile unit surrounded by a chain link fence. It’s currently operating to provide energy to about 6,700 customers in the area. After Helene, Duke Energy transported it here from a storage facility in Garner. Norton explained it’s designed to work indefinitely.
“All power that would normally flow through this damaged substation is flowing through the mobile substation, and that will be the case for multiple months,” said Norton.
The other two substations that will be rebuilt are the Marshall substation in the town of Hot Springs and the New Salem Substation in Swannanoa. Combined, those two facilities service about 5,400 customers. Both sites are also running on mobile substations.
To pay for these rebuilding projects, plus other Helene-related damage, Duke Energy will ask the North Carolina Utilities Commission to approve a storm bond worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Aside from Helene, the storm bond would also cover costs associated with Hurricane Zeta in 2020, Hurricane Ian and Winter Storm Izzy in 2022, and Tropical Storm Debby in August 2024.
It’s too early to say an exact amount on the storm bond, according to Norton, but he estimates the bonds will be reflected in customer bills beginning late next year.
“Any adjustment would be carefully scrutinized by the (Utilities Commission) before being approved,” said Norton via email. “We previously used storm bonds to cover repair costs from historic storms that occurred in 2018-19, and doing so saved customers $300 million on their future energy bills.”
Norton added this is an opportunity to rebuild infrastructure with improved resiliency.
“That will be either building it up higher out of the flood plain or putting a flood wall around it or both. And that takes engineers looking at: what’s the best way to rebuild this?” said Norton.
Both of those resiliency factors are a step in the right direction, according to Dalia Patino-Echeverri, an associate professor of energy systems and public policy at Duke University.
“Those are two measures that will certainly reduce the likelihood that these substations are impacted by flooding in the future,” said Patino-Echeverri. “But there are other things that need to be done if we continue to have these extreme weather episodes.”
Other considerations include replacing wood poles with steel poles, or moving power lines underground.
However, the bigger question here is: what should companies like Duke Energy do to prepare as climate change continues to cause more unprecedented events?
“Helene was such an extreme event,” said Timothy Johnson, a Duke University professor who specializes in energy and the environment. “Now whether it was just a one off that we may not see again for hundreds of years, or whether this is more typical of what we might see on a decade by decade basis. Well … we’ll find out.”
For now, rebuilding the substations in Hot Springs and Swannanoa will likely take several months, while rebuilding the Biltmore Village substation could take up to a year.