More than 1,800 Dominion Energy customers in Norfolk's Ghent neighborhood woke up to dark homes and storefronts Friday morning, as a power outage affected the area. Utility crews were on scene working to restore service, with an estimated window for power to return stretching between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m.
The outage was reported by WAVY.com, which noted that Dominion Energy had not listed a cause for the disruption as of Friday morning. The outage left residents and business owners along Ghent's commercial corridors in the dark during the start of the workday, a particularly inconvenient time for a neighborhood known for its coffee shops, boutiques, and restaurants.
Ghent is a historic Norfolk neighborhood, established in the 1890s and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. The district spans roughly 80 acres of dense 19th-century architecture, with commercial activity concentrated along Colley Avenue and 21st Street, according to the Virginia Department of Historic Resources.
A Neighborhood With High Stakes for Reliable Power
Norfolk's population sits at an estimated 230,930 residents as of 2023 Census Bureau data, according to the Downtown Norfolk Council.
Dominion Energy was the utility responding to the outage. On one customer's circuit, vegetation was identified as the cause of most outages.
Underground Lines and Reliability Efforts
Placing lines underground is one general approach to improving reliability.
Those pressures are compounded by surging demand: Dominion has projected weather-normalized sales growth of 5.4% annually over a decade, driven by rising commercial and residential power use statewide, according to Utility Dive. Separately, a WTVR CBS 6 report discussed localized circuit remediation and spot trimming for one Richmond customer's circuit.
As of Friday morning, Dominion had not specified what caused the Ghent outage. Crews remained focused on restoration, with the utility's estimated window putting full power back online for the neighborhood's residents and businesses by early afternoon.
