While Florida grappled with back-to-back hurricanes this fall, Duke Energy’s year-round grid-strengthening work and advanced technology helped to reduce outage impacts for customers, enabling swift restorations.
During hurricanes Helene and Milton, the company’s self-healing technology prevented more than 300,000 customer outages, saving customers more than 300 million minutes of total outage time.
Similar to a GPS navigation system that can identify an accident ahead and update your route, self-healing grid technology quickly identifies power outages and reroutes power to restore service faster for customers when an outage occurs.
This advanced technology can help isolate the cause of an outage and reduce the number of customers affected by up to 75%, often restoring power in less than a minute. About 77% of Duke Energy Florida customers are directly served by this technology.
“With storms increasing in frequency and intensity, Duke Energy Florida’s Storm Protection Plan, year-round infrastructure work and preparedness efforts are critical to our ability to respond quickly and safely,” said Melissa Seixas, Duke Energy Florida state president. “We’re working around the clock to improve reliability for our customers, strengthen the grid against severe weather and enhance our response after a major storm.”
In addition to investing in advanced technologies, the company manages vegetation near power lines, installs stronger poles, upgrades wires and places lines underground to make the energy grid more resilient, reduce outages and restore power faster for Florida’s growing population.
- Over the past three years, more than 40,000 poles have been hardened through Duke Energy Florida’s Storm Protection Plan. Duke Energy Florida continues to inspect more than 100,000 poles and structures annually and plans on hardening nearly 15,000 poles and structures per year.
- Nearly 50% of Duke Energy Florida’s primary power lines are buried under ground. The company will continue to install underground cable in targeted areas where it is most practical, considering many factors including accessibility, vegetation coverage, asset age, cost and reliability.
- Last year, teams completed more than 4,000 miles of vegetation maintenance on Duke Energy Florida’s distribution lines and 600 miles of planned work on the transmission side, including trimming trees and removing trees that present a hazard to power operations.
- Additionally, the company is expanding capacity of the electric grid by building new substations, expanding existing substations and installing new or larger power lines to provide reliable service in the growing state. Since 2021, teams have completed more than 100 miles of new transmission lines, conducted nearly 100 miles of transmission line upgrades and built approximately 16 new substations in Florida.
These grid improvements and technological innovations help support the efforts of thousands of restoration personnel working to restore power to customers following a major storm. The company works to improve after every storm and applies lessons learned to future response efforts. Duke Energy Florida also relies on key relationships with first responders, emergency response organizations, other utilities and contractors to provide the resources and expertise needed to serve customers effectively every storm.
