By Ed Offley
With the 2025 hurricane season reaching its peak, Florida Power & Light Company officials say the local energy grid has been significantly hardened to withstand outages caused by downed power lines.
“We take storm season very seriously,” FPL spokesman Kamrel Eppinger told PCB Life.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Michael and the acquisition of Gulf Power the next year in 2019, FPL began a systemwide hardening of the power grid in northwest Florida, including Bay County and the Panama City Beach area. “The goal has been to improve resiliency, reliability and helping us get the lights on faster for our customers after severe weather,” Eppinger said.
The utility’s latest 10-year Storm Protection Plan, covering the years 2026 through 2035, projects an overall investment of $14.2 billion for infrastructure hardening, inspections and mitigation programs covering its extended power network that serves 6 million Floridians. This includes 9,500 miles of high-voltage transmission lines, 80,000 miles of electricity distribution lines and 1.4 million power poles in its service areas in the Florida Panhandle and along the East Coast. The Florida Public Service Commission approved the ten-year plan on May 30.
An average residential customer consuming 1,000 kilowatts of power each month contributes about $8 into the protection plan, Eppinger said.
There are three primary components to the infrastructure hardening:
* Replacing older wooden power poles with stronger ones made of concrete or steel. FPL teams were visible along Front Beach Road last year installing steel power poles along that right-of-way. To date, the utility has converted 96 percent of its older power poles statewide, Eppinger said.
Meanwhile, FPL crews are in the process of inspecting 13,042 power poles in Bay County to identify those that need strengthening or replacement. They also monitor 326 miles of power lines in the county to remove intrusive tree limbs of other vegetation, a leading cause of power outages.
* Employing “smart grid technology” that automatically reroutes power around a local outage. FPL crews have installed 9,100 smart grid devices throughout northwest Florida; another seven devices are planned for Bay County this year. The utility has installed 208 of the devices on power lines across the PCB “island.”
“The devices communicate with one another and in the event of a downed line can open and close the circuits to reroute power if necessary,” Eppinger explained.
Statewide, the company’s smart grid technology prevented more than 800,000 outages during the active 2024 hurricane season, he said.
* Identifying vulnerable neighborhoods or service areas and moving overhead power lines to underground. FPL has identified 20 separate parts of the Bay County power grid for inclusion in the Storm Secure Underground Program, Eppinger said. No areas on the PCB “island” have been identified as needing the underground conversion.
“Our dedicated team is committed to providing customers in Bay County with safe and reliable electric service all while keeping bills as low as possible,” said Shane Boyett, senior external affairs manager for FPL. “Although no energy grid is storm proof, these upgrades have improved service reliability by more than 63 percent since 2018 in Northwest Florida …. ”
Other elements of the protection plan include inspection programs for power poles and lines, and vegetation management along the power line rights of way.
RSS
