Florida Power & Light gets high marks for reliability, invests more in grid
Thanks to the company’s efforts to strengthen the energy grid, Florida Power & Light Company’s (FPL) had its best year in terms of customer satisfaction and service reliability in 2018.
The average FPL customer fewer outages than ever before and had the lowest number of flickers or momentary outages as well. The company was named the winner of the 2018 ReliabilityOne National Reliability Excellence Award presented by PA Consulting for the third time in four years. It was earned for providing superior service reliability.
The performance is due in part to the nearly $4 billion in investments FPL has made to the energy grid since 2006.
“We continue to build one of the nation’s strongest, smartest and most storm-resilient energy grids to provide our customers with reliable service year-round, while keeping our typical residential bills among the lowest in the country,” Eric Silagy, president and CEO of FPL, said. “Our ongoing investments in strengthening the grid and using advanced smart grid technology continue to help us deliver electricity our customers can count on in good weather and bad. And, over the next three years, we plan on continuing these efforts as they have demonstrated their value to keep lights on for customers in everyday operations and help speed the efforts to restore power during severe weather.”
The company will continue to improve the energy grid over the next three years by investing another $2 billion to harden its main power lines and replace all remaining wooden transmission structures. Hardening the power lines means installing power poles, which can be a combination of wood and concrete, that will be able to withstand major hurricane-force winds. It also includes shortening the span between poles by installing additional poles and possibly placing some sections of power lines underground. FPL expects that all of its transmission structures will be steel or concrete by the end of 2022. By the end of 2024, FPL will all main power lines within its distribution system either hardened or underground.
Hardened power lines perform 40 percent better than others, which means fewer outages for customers. Customers served by underground main power lines tend to have fewer outages compared to overhead main power lines. About 40 percent of FPL’s 68,000 miles of distribution power lines are already underground.
Along with hardening or undergrounding main power lines serving critical community functions and services, such as police and fire stations, hospitals, ports and 911 centers, FPL has cleared vegetation, inspected and replaced distribution power poles, installed more than 5 million smart meters, and replaced transmission structures, such that 93 percent are concrete or steel.
“The Storm Secure Underground Program is the result of one of the lessons learned from Hurricane Irma, which demonstrated that underground power lines generally operate better than overhead power lines during a storm where trees and wind-blown debris caused the majority of power outages,” Manny Miranda, FPL senior vice president of power delivery, said. “We have already completed a handful of these innovative projects and are gearing up to bring this program and its benefits to customers throughout the state.”
