North Carolinians scrambled to find generators ahead of this weekend’s ice and snow.
Now questions are resurfacing about whether the state should adopt laws to better protect the power grid. The answers may lie in other states, such as Texas, which also dealt with winter storms this weekend.
Winter Storm Uri in 2021 left at least 200 people dead and more than 4 million homes and businesses without power when it hit Texas five years ago.
The crisis caused Texas lawmakers to pass laws requiring public utilities to better prepare power infrastructure for extreme weather. The law also created penalties for noncompliance and allowed funding for backup power at hospitals and other critical facilities.
The new requirements appear to be working: As of Monday, there were few to no power outages reported in nearly all Texas counties, according to KDFW-TV, a Dallas news station, even though this weekend’s storm brought record-breaking snowfall to the state.
North Carolina, which faces winter storms occasionally, still relies primarily on emergency response and voluntary utility measures, raising the question: Should the state wait for disaster before taking certain proactive actions?
“This storm reaffirmed that preparation is key and can make a real difference in saving lives,” Gov. Josh Stein told WRAL Monday.
Duke Energy, which provides power to nearly all North Carolina businesses and residents, says that even without mandates it still regularly takes voluntary action to prepare and improve the state’s power grid.
North Carolina has had more power outages than all but three other states since 2000, according to U.S. Department of Energy data.
“The Texas situation should have sprung us into action, to think about this in advance,” North Carolina state Rep. Pricey Harrison, D-Guilford, said, adding that she’s not aware of any rules here similar to what Texas instituted.
Measures in North Carolina
Harrison said there were some measures she believed were beneficial but they are no longer laws. There is weatherization funding available for individual homeowners under the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program. “Unfortunately, that funding has been cut pretty dramatically at the federal level,” Harrison told WRAL.
WRAL asked Senate Leader Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, and House Speaker Destin Hall, R-Caldwell, whether the state should adopt new laws to better protect the power grid from future storms. Neither indicated they’d support new requirements on utilities.
A spokesperson for Hall says he’s focused on “maintaining a strong rainy-day fund to ensure we are prepared to weather future natural disasters if necessary.”
Berger said he’s been in touch with emergency officials and that “since we’re still in the middle of the storm and do not have damage estimates, it is premature to discuss details of potential legislative action.”
When storms approach the state, state and federal officials routinely declare states of emergency, have state transportation crews treat icy roads, activate the National Guard, and provide temporary Medicaid flexibilities such as early prescription refills.
Duke Energy says its emergency response strategy doesn’t only consist of sending crews out after a storm to repair downed lines. “We have a very robust multi-year grid improvement strategy that we’ve worked with our regulators to establish that helps us to strengthen the grid, to make it more resistant to outages from severe weather,” Jeff Brooks, a Duke Energy spokesman, said in an interview Monday.
The company plans its spending five years out.
“Roughly half of what we’re spending in our current five-year plan is for modernizing and improving the electric grid. And that would include reliability and resiliency improvements,” Brooks said.
Money spent on improving the state’s power grid might simply be passed onto customers in the form of higher power bills. Texas, unlike North Carolina, requires utilities to weatherize generation, transmission and natural gas facilities for extreme weather. And Texans also have higher power bills.
According to the website Choose Energy, which analyzes electricity costs nationwide, Texans pay more for their power than North Carolinians do, although both states are below the national average.
Other states have taken different approaches to power-outage worries. Virginia has a state program — the Emergency Shelter Upgrade Assistance Grant Fund — that provides matching funds to localities to install or repair backup energy generation infrastructure at emergency shelters.
Brooks said Duke Energy takes it upon itself to make sure it is cost effective for customers. Duke has what it calls self-healing technology across the state that can help automatically detect power outages and reroute power to restore service faster, Brooks added.
The energy giant has also buried some of its power lines, another strategy that comes with added expense but has been proven to lessen power outages.
These are voluntary measures since North Carolina doesn’t require utilities to do the work.
Substation vulnerabilities
Extreme weather isn’t the only risk to power infrastructure. Lawmakers considered new measures after a December 2022 incident in which Duke Energy substations in Moore County were shot at, knocking out power for thousands for several days and contributing to at least one death, according to authorities.
The state legislature responded by raising criminal penalties for damaging utility equipment. But lawmakers did nothing to take proactive measures to prevent similar attacks in the future. A bipartisan bill that would have required Duke to put in place security upgrades at its facilities — potentially cameras, fences, sensors or guards — wasn’t allowed up for a vote at the state legislature, where Duke spends substantial amounts of money on lobbying and campaign contributions.
“Our objective was appreciating people wanting to help and trying to find good solutions, but making sure that we could find the right solution that met our unique needs as a utility,” Brooks said.
Technologies and Costs
Duke Energy has deployed self-healing grid technology in pilot areas to automatically reroute electricity around outages. The technology prevented millions of hours of power outages for people and businesses statewide in 2025, Duke told WRAL last week.
Burying power lines is another option, but Duke says it’s expensive and can take longer to repair. Burying lines might also be difficult in places with rocky terrain or other difficult soil or topography.
Do Proactive Measures Make Sense?
Duke energy said mandates could raise costs for customers, and that current technology and emergency response may suffice.
The current measures appeared to be enough for this weekend’s storm. At its height Sunday, 31,000 utility customers across the state lost power, which is a small percentage of the state’s 11 million residents and thousands of businesses.
Duke Energy says it is evaluating more advanced grid resilience technologies. The company is also a financial backer of a public-private push to boost university research, called NC Innovation, whose projects include research from UNC-Charlotte on improving power grid efficiency.
But without legal requirements, large-scale infrastructure investments are left to the utility’s discretion.
Stein said last week, ahead of the storm, that he was confident in Duke’s ability to respond quickly to power outages.
“They are taking this storm very seriously, and they are bringing in assets from other states that are not as threatened as North Carolina is,” Stein said.
