CHARLOTTE – The Duke Energy Progress merger is at the heart of power outage confusion for Orange County customers Sunday.

Though all customers are now under one company name, remnants of the separate entities are lingering.

After the initial blast of outages caused by the 4:00 a.m. car accident that took out two power poles Sunday, approximately 350 customers remained without power. The outage lasted for more than 12 hours, and power was fully restored at 8:20 p.m.

If you logged on to Duke-Energy to check the outage and clicked the region of North Carolina that included OrangeCounty—the former Progress Energy region which is highlighted in green—you wouldn’t see any outages being reported. However, if you clicked the Duke Energy region (highlighted in blue), you would have seen the outages reported for Orange County.

A Duke Energy media spokesperson says you will have to continue to use the website that way until the company completes the merge of its back end functions.

The Duke-Progress merger was announced in 2011 and was completed July 2, 2012. Duke Energy Progress is now the nation’s largest regulated utility and serves approximately seven million customers in six states.

Duke Energy Outage Map

Progress Energy Outage Map

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