Duke Energy built solar in a mountain town to improve reliability. Helene was its biggest test.

41 days after Helene hit, Duke Energy reports there's still dozens of outages in the hardest hit mountain communities. But in one small town, there it is. Power was restored within just days. New at Six Channel 9's Climate Reporter, Michelle Alfini takes us to Hot Springs to show us how typically a bustling resort town downtown Hot Springs in Madison County is just starting to rebuild. This whole strip right here it down to town hall, the brewery. Back in there, Amanda Arnett runs the Spring Creek Tavern, 1 of several businesses heavily damaged in Helene's floods. She expects it will be months before they can reopen. The worst part about the whole situation is for the employees that all lost their jobs. Donna, may I help you? That's why. Just a few blocks up the street. Would you like to place the order? Yes, ma'am. Go ahead. Jeania Hayes Peterson wanted to reopen the Smoky Mountain Diner as quickly as she could. I mean, we needed to be here. My girls have been out of work for two weeks. She was fortunate the diner didn't see any flood damage. Instead, the hold up was electricity. The town of Hot Springs is fed by 10 mile long line from the Marshall, our Marshall substation, and that line goes over very steep terrain. It's very hard to access and it's extremely remote. Duke Energy's General manager of distributed energy, Jason Henley says that meant outages were frequent and difficult to fix. So instead of building more power lines, Duke Energy decided to build more power generation closer to town. This solar and battery micro grid, it gave us a great opportunity to test this technology. The solar charges the batteries and serves the greater power grid. But in the case of an emergency, the micro grid stands alone and the solar and batteries work solely to provide power. Downtown Hurricane Helene was its biggest test. We started talking with the mayor trying to figure out how bad the town was hurt. Hot Springs did lose power, but within days, Handley says Duke was able to make it to the micro grid, get the batteries recharged, and start producing power again by October 2nd. For Marlene, we've also learned that we can stretch the system farther than we thought we could originally. Once Duke Energy was able to get this micro grid back up and running, it could provide power to downtown Hot Springs 24/7 for seven days. We were able to serve. Without the micro grid being here, the town would have been completely without power. The refrigerator were able to be on, you know, and they were able to, you know, sort of have some kind of normalcy. Hayes Peterson reopened shortly after. I mean, we needed to be here. While she says it will still take months before Hot Springs fully recovers, she's grateful the town and her business weathered the storm. And we're blessed. We went home with our families. We were went home to our home. A lot of people didn't in Madison County. Michelle Alfini, Channel 9 Eyewitness News.