Duke Energy Florida is preparing to respond quickly and restore power faster before the 2024 hurricane season and has a comprehensive and flexible storm response plan in place.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has predicted an above-normal hurricane season with 17 to 25 named storms in 2024, including 8 to 13 hurricanes, and 4 to 7 of those to become major hurricanes. The forecast predicts around 30% more storm activity as compared to the number of storms predicted in 2023.
With the company’s Storm Protection Plan and infrastructure work, Duke Energy Florida is making improvements and upgrades to its systems and lines to support the rapid growth of Florida communities, enhance storm response and provide better information during outages.
The improvements include upgrading poles and wires to increase reliability and better withstand storms, strategically placing outage-prone lines underground in some areas, managing trees and vegetation, and installing smart, self-healing technology to automatically detect power outages and quickly restore power when an outage occurs.
· During hurricanes Ian, Nicole and Idalia, self-heling technology saved more than 200 million outage minutes for Duke Energy Florida customers. More than 70% of Duke Energy Florida customers benefit from self-healing and automated restoration technologies.
· The company plans to install hundreds of miles of underground cable in areas that are identified as the most outage-prone lines. Approximately 48% of Duke Energy Florida’s primary power lines are underground and better protected from wind damage.
· Teams have completed more than 4,000 miles of maintenance trimming on Duke Energy Florida’s distribution lines and 600 miles of planned work on the transmission side.
· Over the past three year, more than 40,000 poles have been hardened through the Storm Protection Plan.
· The company is also expanding capacity of the electric grid by building substations, expanding existing substations and installing larger circuits to provide reliable service in the growing state.
Duke Energy has completed optimization of eight substations, with another 38, under progress in Florida. The company reduced the average length of a customer outage by 27 percent between 2018 and 2023.
