Duke Energy’s grid-strengthening work and advanced technology has helped Florida communities to be resilient and better protected against hurricanes.
According to the National Hurricane Center, the peak of the Atlantic hurricane season was September 10, with most activity to be registered between mid-August and mid-October.
During Hurricane Debby, the company’s self-healing technology saved more than 12.5 million minutes of customer total outage time and automatically restored more than 62,000 customer outages. While more than 76% of Duke Energy Florida customers are served by this technology, it can reduce the number of customers affected by a power outage by up to 75% and often restore power in less than a minute.
The investments helped Duke Energy Florida to immediately restore power for 93% of its customers within 24 hours following Hurricane Debby.
During hurricanes Ian, Nicole and Idalia, self-healing technology helped save more than 200 million outage minutes for Duke Energy Florida customers.
The company aims to continue installing underground cable in areas identified as the most outage-prone areas. 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.
More than 40,000 poles are hardened through the Storm Protection Plan since the past three years.
Duke Energy is also expanding capacity of the electric grid by building new substations, expanding existing substations and installing new or larger circuits to provide reliable service in Florida. The company has completed optimization of 12 substations, with another 50 under progress in the state.
Duke Energy also acknowledges lessons learned and collaborations with first responders as well as federal, state and local emergency management agencies.
