NC Gov. Cooper demands Duke Energy explain why they cut power without warning

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper has questioned why Duke Energy cut off power to hundreds of thousands of city residents. The power has been turned back on but the outage left many without power on one of the coldest days of the year.

“Duke Energy assures me NC is in the clear now. But I’m deeply concerned about people who lost power and who didn’t get notice about rotating outages. Grateful for those who conserved energy. I’ve asked Duke for a complete report on what went wrong and for changes to be made,” Cooper tweeted Monday.

The day prior, on Christmas Eve, temperatures plunged to single digits in North Carolina. Duke Energy said they were forced to start rolling blackouts due to the high demand on the power grid.

Despite the energy company saying the outages would last only 15 to 30 minutes, many reported that their power was off for hours. Duke Energy spokesman Jeff Brooks acknowledged this in a Saturday tweet.

“Temp[orary] outages have lasted longer in some instances than originally communicated. We apologize for this inconvenience and have been working to manage extremely high demand for power in record temps, and are doing all we can to restore power safely and as quickly as possible,” Brooks said.

Duke Energy continued to request that customers conserve power in the days following the initial outages.