Reliable power is one of the highest priorities for Duke Energy and its customers. Despite some wild weather, including harsh arctic cold that pushed customer demand for power to historic levels in Duke Energy’s Midwest and Carolinas service territories, power reliability remained high and continued its improving performance trend over the past three years.

Duke Energy’s diverse generation fleet capably met our customers’ demand in 2014, but did not meet aggressive internal reliability improvement targets.

Nuclear fleet capacity factor, a measure of generation reliability, improved from 92.8 percent in 2013 to 93.2 percent in 2014, and exceeded 90 percent for the 16th consecutive year. The regulated fossil fleet also improved commercial availability performance slightly, from 85.7 percent in 2013 to 85.9 percent in 2014.

The combined, nonregulated fossil and renewables fleets’ commercial availability and renewables yield slipped from 91.9 percent in 2013 to 88.9 percent in 2014. Duke Energy Renewables availability metric, Energy Yield, improved to 96.0 percent in 2014 from 93.9 percent in the prior year.