Duke Energy of the Carolinas

This year has been especially bad with the hurricanes and rains, I've emptied and replaced my food three times costing nearly 1,500 total, it fried my upstairs AC unit by flickering during hurricane Florence, costing me 4700 hundred dollars to have replaced, it burnt out my brand new golf carts internal charging board flickering on and off costing me 800 dollars to replace. Me and my wife obviously couldn't work or send oldest to school with no water or power when we went four days down which cost use our income.

It has been a twelve year constant pain in the side, it's a major reason behind why I'm planning on selling this home and moving under REMC coverage elsewhere. There comes a point when a company should become inclined to acknowledge their actions or lack thereof, the results of these actions and take care of the consumers that keep them in business. Their equipment is old, worn out and outdated, they know this but do nothing to update it, they don't repair or replace any of it unless it fails. Like many others customers they service, I have never missed or been late making my huge monthly payment to this company, but they do nothing to help us consumers and the reasons are simple, it cost a lot of money that they are unwilling to spend satisfying the little guys.

They have the best of the best in the extremely affluent sections of their coverage areas, when a disaster happens they send the repair crews to the wealthiest amongst us first. These aren't just accusations made by a jealous poor man, I'm not poor by any means and work in close proximity with the electric service providers across the middle Eastern part of the country.

When the second of two deadly hurricanes hit us (Florence and Matthew) REMC had initiated the emergency protocols, they had dozens and dozens of trucks from all across the country staged beforehand along with every support element necessary to successfully battle a natural disaster, while maintaining coverage as well as humanly possible and restoring coverage quickly when it was knocked out. They did their consumers a tremendous job throughout both storms while enduring the hardships of each head on.

Duke had dozens trucks in place for hurricane Florence also, but failed to have the appropriate support element's in place or a staging site efficient enough to proficiently carry out operations necessary to ensure consumers with the best coverage possible or shortest down times possible. They were forced to scramble and then repair equipment, fuel trucks, replenish supplies, and prepare for duty so while in the harsh elements, even sleeping and eating whatever was available inside the repair trucks. It was totally unprofessional and ineffective at providing acceptable service to consumers, or acceptable work conditions for the repair crews.

The second hurricane to come through (Matthew I believe) found REMC ready and prepared to handle it head on again. Duke however decided to ignore the weather forecaster's predictions, they made an internal decision to ignore the national weather advisory also, they decided that it was going to be a very minor event and it would blow over, I believe they assumed the weather service was over inflating its impact because hurricane Florence had so grossly exceeded predictions. Whatever convinced them hurricane Matthew wasn't a serious event and didn't represent a legitimate threat to Central North Carolina is irrelevant, because it was a major storm and did substantial damage to North Carolina, along with Florida up to New York and everything in-between. They didn't initiate any emergency protocols at all.

When the hurricane hit one company was on top of it wide open and maintained outstanding service, the other was caught with its pants down and only had its normal repair crews on duty, two trucks that were themselves short repair men to form two complete crews to operate them. Power was interrupted all across the east coast and those of us with Duke energy spent days without power because they had to call for help from FEMA, almost every electric crew in the country was either on the east coast already or headed there, finding the support was difficult and it took time to free them up and arrive, it was a terribly miserable time for almost all Duke consumers, along with the crews they needed who had to scramble to get done at one location and race here with no rest to fight our hurricane.

It was totally Duke Energy's fault, it was created entirely because of greed, they rolled the dice to try and save money at the expense of the consumers and service crew workers' well being, they failed. The others who were covered by a membership Corp had very short outages and were taken care of quickly, Duke's consumers had literally days to wait and not even an apology for mismanaging a natural disaster and causing thousands of consumers excessive, unnecessary hardship was coming.

But after a few weeks we did all receive a letter in the mail explaining basically that even though they had cut every corner and pinched every penny possible, it was still costly and our rates were going up as a direct reflection of the huge amount it cost them to repair their equipment after the storms. Do you think they used this extra money to upgrade this obsolete equipment? No, not even a little, so I sit here in the dark going on hour 8 at 1:46 am because it sprinkled this afternoon and we had a twenty mph wind gust. My 279 dollar power bill is in my mail box as I type this, my home is occupied 24/7 so that's just another average bill.

But the fact that terrible coverage has cost me right at 7,000 dollars in repairs this year alone has given me a lot of reasons to think about my arrangements.... I can sell and relocate (what a pain), I can buy a Generac whole house system and propane powered appliances (at this rate it'll pay for itself in under two years) or just keep taking it and continue getting crappy service while paying top dollar for it along with paying good money to fix my belongings their negligence Continuously damages. You will never win against any crooked corporate with a Monopoly on its consumers, so options are always limited, but I don't have to continue giving them my money, although leaving them isn't as easy as a phone call either, unfortunately.

I do plan on moving under a providers umbrella that I know first hand at least gives Max effort to provide quality service. I feel bad for anyone like myself who unknowingly chooses to build in a poor electric service providers district and even worse if you were unlucky enough to build in one of that provides us worst coverage as I did. It's bad enough to have second or third rate coverage, it's even worse when you get the worst they have to offer.

Here's an idea, on the off chance any Duke executive were to see this and care enough to make it this far! If you're unwilling to update or replace your worn out, rusty, garbage equipment you have hanging all over the state, with new improved equipment that we all know exists, and you're also unwilling to properly trim trees on a realistic scale to properly allow appropriate power line clearance. The least you could do is stop raising rates and offer some kinda coverage Ins. That could help guys like me when your ** service destroys my most valuable electronic utilities and possessions, it could provide some relief in the repairs. Not necessarily laptops or ceiling fans, that's whatever. But an HVAC system, an electric golf cart computer, 500 dollars worth of spoiled groceries over and over, fridge's, freezers, water pumps, solid waste pumps, televisions and other expensive items we pay a lot for.

We have family members on oxygen pumps that require electricity, no power they gotta go to hospital or a power source at best. You are supposed to provide an extremely important service but your pathetic efforts coupled with dangerous assumptions regarding natural disasters isn't just dangerous. It's unacceptable! Once again someone there should be held accountable. A lot of these things are necessities when you have children and others depending on you, But either way, many of us work hard everyday to pay your bill and Save what we can to buy the things that get destroyed when you fail us, so instead of charging me extra for something I'm not at all satisfied with, try looking out for the consumer, we are people also.

If you had insurance to help with damaged items related to power surges and outages you would make a substantial profit, many of us would pay the extra twenty or whatever. You undoubtedly can find the resources to get accurate estimates and come to find in correct, you would make a fortune, and please lots of people tired of fixing stuff we believe you broke by being a cheap, lazy, selfish company who really doesn't care about anyone period.