Gulf energy companies show infrastructure improvements, preparedness drills for hurricane season
A combination of preparedness drills and infrastructure improvements make energy companies operating in the Gulf states better equipped to handle this year’s hurricane season, say officials.
The season runs through Nov. 30, a particularly vulnerable time for systems to provide energy to homes and businesses. However, investments made by Florida Power and Light (FPL) prior to 2016’s Hurricane Matthew and 2017’s Hurricane Irma curtailed damage. The company has improved overall service, and since 2006, FPL has invested $4 billion to strengthen its energy grid.
“In Florida, it is not a matter of if, but when a hurricane will impact a portion of our state, as we saw with last year’s devastating Hurricane Michael,” said Eric Silagy, president and CEO of FPL. “While we may not know exactly when and where a hurricane will strike, we know that we must always be prepared to restore power to Floridians or others who need us. Every year, our drill is a commitment to push ourselves and improve upon our procedures when responding to a natural disaster.”
Earlier this year the company announced its plans to continue hardening the energy grid during the next three years by additionally investing approximately $2 billion, which includes hardening its main power lines and replacing the remaining wooden transmission structures, according to an FPL written statement. By the end of 2022, FPL expects that its transmission structures will be steel or concrete. Shortly thereafter the company plans to have hardened or placed underground all main power lines within its distribution system, including those serving critical and key community facilities.
Last month the company tested the response of more than 3,000 employees to a hypothetical hurricane. The annual hurricane drill, which included local first responders, provided an opportunity to demonstrate how the company continuously improves its efforts, say company officials.
Recently, Gulf Power employees conducted their storm drill for the 2019 Atlantic hurricane season. They drilled on a scenario where Hurricane Haley, a Category 1 storm with 90 mph winds, made landfall on Navarre Beach and moved northward through Milton, Fla., knocking out power to almost 81,000 customers.
“Each hurricane is different and offers a different set of challenges,” said Mike Spoor, vice president of power delivery. “Even though the real Hurricane Michael is still fresh in our minds, this annual storm drill helps us ensure prior learnings are part of our plans, prepare for new possible storm impact scenarios and make sure every member of the Gulf Power team is ready to fulfill their storm duty assignment if we have to respond to another severe weather situation again this year.”
When Gulf Power marshaled 7,500 employees and outside resources into the Bay County area in October following Hurricane Michael, they were able to restore power to 99 percent of the customers who could safely receive power in 13 days, according to the company.
Hurricane season has pushed energy companies to come up with innovative ways to address the possibility of natural disasters.
Duke Energy is building a smart-thinking grid that will increase reliability for customers by anticipating outages and rerouting power to speed restoration or avoid the outage altogether. Self-healing technology provides the ability to also reroute and restore power to the maximum number of customers, eliminating trouble events, as well as enabling and facilitating the management of distributed energy resources, says Ana Gibbs, senior communications consultant at Duke Energy Florida.
Much like GPS can find users alternative paths through traffic jams, Duke Energy’s electricity can be redirected to automatically find a different path and restore power in less than one minute. Self-healing technology now serves more than 34 percent of their customers in Florida and prevented 203,000 outages and more than 15 million customer minutes of interruption in 2018. In the next 10 years, 80 percent of Duke Energy customers will benefit from this technology, Gibbs says.
“We’re adding groundbreaking technologies such as remote sensors and monitoring, and advanced communication systems that deliver real-time information from thousands of points along the grid,” she said. “This information enables the grid to make intelligent decisions to keep power reliable.”
In addition, the company will use targeted undergrounding to improve storm response and reliability by using smart data to identify the most outage-prone power lines and move those lines underground. Moving these lines can limit power outages and momentary service interruptions, and it can reduce costs and quicken restoration time after a major event for all customers, Gibbs added.
