Utility Business

Early FPL Estimate Puts Hurricane Damage At More Than $1B

Oct. 23, 2024

Helene and Milton hit about 16 million of the company’s solar panels but damaged fewer than 0.05% of them.

Florida Power & Light leaders expect to ask regulators to let them charge customers $1.2 billion next year to cover the costs of damage inflicted by this month’s Hurricanes Helene and Milton.

Brian Bolster, CFO of FPL parent NextEra Energy Inc., said Oct. 23 that the $1.2 billion figure is preliminary and includes $150 million to refill a reserve fund the FPL depleted in August to respond to damages from Hurricane Debby. FPL will submit its surcharge plan to the Florida Public Service Commission in the near future.

Hitting Florida and other parts of the Southeast in quick succession earlier this month, Helene and Milton caused about 680,000 and 2 million FPL customers, respectively, to lose power. Speaking on an Oct. 23 conference call with analysts after NextEra reported its third-quarter results, Chairman, President and CEO John Ketchum lauded his teams’ preparation and restoration work and thanked Florida officials and mutual-aid partners for their contributions.

Ketchum said FPL crews were able to restore service to 95% of affected Helene customers by the end of their second full day of work and to 95% of customers knocked offline by Milton by the end of the fourth full day of restoration work. He also noted that FPL’s smart-grid investments helped a total of 739,000 customers avoid outages and called out the resilience of FPL’s large solar generation portfolio: Less than 0.05% of the roughly 16 million solar panels at 66 sites hit by one or both hurricanes were damaged—none of them significantly.

Other items discussed in NextEra’s Q3 report—which showed net income of $1.85 billion on operating revenues of $7.57 billion—and its leaders’ conference call included:

The signing of deals with two Fortune 50 companies to develop up to 10.5 gigawatts of renewable-energy projects by the end of 2030. Executives pointed out that the customers are not hyperscaler data center and technology companies and said they plan to reveal the companies when they announce definitive project agreements.
An ongoing evaluation of a potential recommissioning of the company’s Duane Arnold nuclear plant in Iowa, a potential move first discussed in July. Ketchem said data-center customers are showing “very strong interest” in that project.
NextEra Energy Resources, the company’s renewables division, added about 3 gigawatts to its backlog for the second quarter in a row. Ketchum said the strong activity of the past year ha put NextEra in a position to grow its total renewables generation portfolio to 81 gigawatts by the end of 2027 from 38 gigawatts today.

Shares of NextEra (Ticker: NEE) were up nearly 1% to $84.36 after the earnings report and conference call. They have risen nearly 30% over the past six months, pushing the company’s market capitalization to more than $173 billion.

About the Author

Geert De Lombaerde | Senior Editor

A native of Belgium, Geert De Lombaerde has more than two decades of business journalism experience and writes about markets and economic trends for Endeavor Business Media publications T&D World, Healthcare Innovation, IndustryWeek, FleetOwner and Oil & Gas Journal. With a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri, he began his reporting career at the Business Courier in Cincinnati and later was managing editor and editor of the Nashville Business Journal. Most recently, he oversaw the online and print products of the Nashville Post and reported primarily on Middle Tennessee’s finance sector as well as many of its publicly traded companies.