Greenville Utilities has wrapped up its investigation into the cause of Saturday’s power outage. We believe a fault on a transmission line caused a circuit breaker on a transformer at the main point of delivery substation to trip and shut off, turning off power to roughly one-third of GUC’s electric customers. This was an automatic precaution designed as a safety measure to protect both the substation and our customers and the transformer was re-energized on Saturday. There was no damage discovered to the substation equipment or the circuit that went down. GUC has also examined the circuit and, having found no issues, plans to energize the circuit later this week.
Because of a construction project underway on the Duke Energy Progress (DEP) side of the substation (this is a substation where we take delivery of the electricity from DEP), the other GUC transformer on site was offline. Had the project not been underway, that second transformer should have been able to continue to handle the load in a scenario like this.
Still, GUC personnel were able to re-route power to customers using the two other point of delivery substations as designed. Recent investments in our systems, such as a new point of delivery substation and new transmission loops, allowed this timely service restoration for customers.
There is no evidence to support any vandalism or cyber-attack as has been widely speculated in social media.
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