Texas, now the eighth largest economy in the world according to some counts, was the venue for the 2024 Southeastern Electric Exchange. It was a fitting host for this organization of investor-owned electric utility companies. In 2023, Texas produced more electricity than any other state and generated more than twice as much as second-place Florida. Texas accounted for 13% of the nation’s total electricity net generation in 2023.
The general session kicked off the conference on June 26, with a host company welcome from Jim Greer, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Oncor; and then a lively panel on industry challenges and innovative solutions featuring Emily Henson of Duke Energy; Fran Forehand, senior vice president, Transmission, of Georgia Power; and Joe Woomer, SVP Electric Transmission at Dominion Energy.
The S.E.E also announced its industry excellence award winners, as it does at each annual conference, with Florida Power & Light, Duke Energy and Georgia Power winning awards in training, distribution, supply chain and substation, just to name a few. Following are highlights of this year’s S.E.E awards:
Chairman’s Award, Training Category
The top award in training went to Florida Power & Light for its integrated apprentice training program. Building on the virtual training programs the utility developed during COVID-19 restrictions, FPL moved to include virtual training across all training programs. Organizational training now uses Cisco WebEx as well as augmented reality (AR). These methods allow for greater customizability across the service territory to meet each trainee’s needs. Quizzes and interactive modules improve knowledge retention and allow apprentices to fit lessons seamlessly into their lives.
Distribution
Duke Energy’s Hurricane Idalia Response: Hitting Duke Energy Florida’s service territory Aug. 30, 2023, the Category 3 Hurricane Idalia cut 200,000 customers off from power. Duke brought advanced forecasting, damage modeling and practices from its decades of experience in dealing with storms to bear, moving some 4,000 lineworkers and others into the damaged areas. Power was restored to 90% of affected customers within 24 hours. Duke’s focus on safety provided the foundation to complete the restoration “event free,” on and off the system.
At the event, Duke Energy shared its storm preparedness and EOC engagement process, along with its storm hardening efforts. Duke also shared that it continues to help rebuild those communities that it serves. In advance of the storm, Duke Energy donated $250,000 to the American Red Cross disaster responder program, $50,000 to the Volunteer Florida Foundation as well as an additional $100,000 post storm to support communities impacted by Hurricane Idalia.
Distribution
Florida Power & Light’s Hurricane Ian Restoration: Ian’s impact on Sept. 28, 2022, as a powerful Category 4, smashed Florida for three days. Despite this impact, FPL’s experience and training in dealing with hurricane impacts allowed for crews to spring into action, using innovative methods such as airboats, kayaks and drones to address hard-to-reach areas. More than 1,000 out-of-state personnel as well as trucks and equipment were mobilized. FPL also deployed its mobile office containers (cFORTs) to serve as local command posts and communications hubs. The utility also observed that its many storm hardening improvements to its power grid paid off, as zero transmission structures were damaged and water dams prevented storm surges from swamping substations.
FPL also learned several lessons from Ian and is working on future hardening guidelines for coastal communities, improving pre staging stie conditions and leveraging emerging technologies to increase resilience for any future storms.
Supply Chain
Duke Energy’s Transformer Acquisition: At a time of global transformer supply chain constraint, Duke Energy’s demand for transformers has grown 31% since 2020 mostly because of ratepayer growth and system resiliency work. Duke faced a shortfall of thousands of transformers, but its supply chain and customer delivery workers came together to build a prioritization model, alter distribution standards and adjust policy to help close the gap. This helped shrink the gap, but team members also crafted a mitigation strategy that moved transformers to urgent projects and reassigned zero-load units. Thanks to these efforts, Duke acquired more transformers in 2022 than in the year prior, and successfully addressed a 10,000-unit gap while meeting nearly all project deadlines and receiving few customer complaints.
Substation
Florida Power & Light’s Alton Substation: Miami’s South Beach neighborhood has tremendous electricity demand and some of the most valuable real estate in the world, leading to space concerns. FPL’s Alton substation was built on a relatively tiny 51’ by 150’ postage stamp of a lot in a high-density area. It includes a five-breaker 69 kV high side, 2-transformer 13.8 kV low side station with eight feeder positions into a vertically constructed space. More than 20 designs were considered that could still meet project demands, leading to this “tiny but mighty” substation.
Environmental
Florida Power & Light’s Sustainable Permit Portal: FPL developed its Permit Tracking Management Program based on the Salesforce platform. The system supports more than 1,000 active projects and helps engineers and consultants track T&D projects that have environmental considerations. The system has led to work efficiencies, better communications and enabled decisions to be more data-driven. The system was also designed to be artificial intelligence-ready.
Real Estate and Right of Way
Florida Power & Light’s PGA Building A: FPL found that its Juno Beach corporate headquarters could be vulnerable to storm surge and wind damage, leading the utility to plan a new, hardened four-building campus further inland. The new Building A houses three control centers, a main data center and a training center. The facility also provides for continuity of business and emergency operations. With modifications, the building can sleep 200 outage workers or accommodate 500 extra staff to work if another building becomes inoperable. The building and its parking can survive a Category 5 hurricane and a 500-year flood event. Its design specifications will serve as the model for future planned buildings at FPL.
Transmission Line
Georgia Power Co.’s UAS Inspection Program: Georgia Power developed an in-house team of pilots and subject matter experts to combine the best advantages of uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) with an efficient system for making use of all the data the drones produced. The program has sharpened the utility’s outage restoration efforts and minimized customer downtime. At the same time, the utility saw a 60% cost savings compared to its former inspection programs.
Rates and Regulation
Duke Energy’s Comprehensive Rate Design Study: Duke’s CRDS is a years-long reform study of nearly all of Duke’s rate designs in the Carolinas. It resulted in improvements to time-of-use, net metering, demand charges, EV rate designs and other reforms. To build this study, Duke used AMI and data analytics, estimating costs for almost every customer. The North Carolina Utility Commission approved all the major recommendations of the plan, responding to the tremendous amount of stakeholder engagement throughout the process.
Safety
Georgia Power Co.’s Eyes on the Wire project: In addressing the danger of arc flash or contact injuries to workers, Georgia Power found that inexperienced line workers were a factor. To help, the utility hired back some recent retirees to share their knowledge. They provided front-line workers with a trained set of eyes already familiar with critical risks, policies and best practices.
The event concluded on June 28, with the announcement that the 2025 S.E.E conference and trades show will be welcomed in Orlando, Florida, on June 24-27, 2025.
