Except when there was a “major event” that broadly damaged or affected the electrical grid, the 86,466 homes, businesses, and industrial sites that get power from the Fayetteville Public Works Commission rarely experienced an outage in 2025, the utility’s board learned Wednesday.
“The majority of our customers didn’t even have an outage last year,” said Marc Tunstall, the PWC’s electric systems chief operating officer. Tunstall presented an annual electrical system reliability and resilience update to PWC commissioners.
Data in Tunstall’s presentation on Wednesday, compared to a similar presentation in 2024, showed PWC’s electrical service was more reliable in 2025 than in 2024.
PWC, which is owned by the City of Fayetteville, provides electrical, water, and sewer services to much of Fayetteville and nearby areas. It buys most of its electricity from Duke Energy to resell to its customers.
In PWC’s Top 10 non “major event” power failures of 2025—totaling 720 incidents—errant animals were the No. 1 cause, with 222 incidents, according to Tunstall’s presentation. For example, squirrels chew the cables, he said. The PWC is installing wildlife guards and other tools to reduce these incidents.
This was followed by failure of electricity conductors and cables, which happened 107 times. Falling trees and limbs, or other vegetation, caused 74 failures. Next was contractors who damaged the infrastructure by mistake, with 69 incidents.
Those contractor incidents were driven by contractors installing underground fiber optic cables for internet service providers Brightspeed and Metronet, Tunstall said.
“We have a lot of people installing fiber through directional boring activities,” he said. “And when they hit our facilities, the outages are extensive.” Not only do they strike electrical infrastructure, they also hit water and sewer lines, he said.
PWC notched four major event power failures in 2025, according to Tunstall’s presentation. They were at PWC’s three point of delivery power stations that bring electricity from Duke Energy into PWC’s grid:
- January 5, 2025, at the western Fayetteville Waters Edge point of delivery station, caused by equipment failure. It affected 6,387 homes, businesses and other customer locations, and lasted 81 minutes.
- May 1, 2025, at PWC’s Butler-Warner Generation Plant, which also is a point of delivery site. The outage was due to a contractor’s error in the site’s operations. This struck 10,818 customer sites for 78 minutes.
- August 16, 2025, at the delivery station on Owen Drive, caused by equipment failure. The outage reached 29,429 customer addresses for 73 minutes.
- September 26, 2025, at the Owen Drive site, due to equipment failure. For 24 minutes, 19,256 customer locations lost power.
PWC’s service was more reliable than what other municipal power providers in North Carolina have reported for 2025, Tunstall said. Data for Duke Energy, the biggest electric utility in North Carolina, is not yet available for 2025, he said. PWC’s 2025 performance was significantly better than Duke’s 2024 performance, he said.
In a related data point, Winter Storm Fern that brought ice to the area in January 2026 caused 21 power outages and affected 3,146 customer addresses, Tunstall said.
Senior reporter Paul Woolverton can be reached at pwoolverton@cityviewnc.com.
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