It didn't take long for him to discover a problem. Not with his new property, but with the power company.
"We moved in three weeks ago, and since then, we've had two major power outages. One last week and yesterday," Ekanem said. "The one yesterday was for over five hours. And it was getting pretty cold in the evening, so we're a bit worried."
Ekanem said he is worried that the outages will become a recurring issue.
"It feels like the infrastructure is not up to par," he said.
Other neighbors shared the same concern, showing ABC11 several outage alerts in the past year.
"We get power outages about once a month here," said Brian Green. "Sometimes it's frequent, sometimes sporadic, sometimes quick, and sometimes long."
Green works from home and said the outages are more than an inconvenience. It's critical to his career. Green said he believes all the new developments in the area may be a factor in the outages.
"I think it's construction. There's a lot of construction going on there. A lot of new homes are going up. So that could be what's causing it," Green said. "I work from home, so I need power. I need Internet, you know, that's how I make my living working from home."
Duke Energy confirmed three outages in Rolesville this year. One of the outages was on Tuesday. Spokesperson Jeff Brooks said the outage neighbors experienced on Tuesday was caused by equipment failure. It affected 3,500 customers, and an estimated 400 customers were without power for 18 hours.
"One of our underground lines had an issue, and we had to go in and do a lot more extensive work to make that repair," explained Brooks. "We're making some upgrades that will add more capacity to those lines for all the new neighborhoods and businesses that are moving in. We're also adding new energy pathways so we can reroute power when we have outages."
ABC11 brought Brooks the concerns of neighbors and wanted to know whether Duke Energy could keep up with the growth of Wake County, one of the fastest-growing communities in the country.
"We absolutely believe we can meet that growing demand. Will it be easy? No. We have a lot of work and planning that we have to do to make sure we're making the right grid improvements, the right capacity upgrades, to make sure that we're able to reliably meet that growth and help our communities thrive. That's what an electric utility does," said Brooks.
He said the same improvements that are happening in Rolesville will happen in other parts of the county that are also experiencing major growth
"We've been engaged in a multi-year grid improvement strategy here in the Triangle and across the state," Brooks said. "And that strategy is seeking to improve reliability, expand capacity, increase resiliency, so we can shorten outage times, adding things like self-healing technology in our communities that can automatically restore power."
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