Duke Energy increasing hurricane prep for 2 million Florida energy customers

Duke Energy of Florida is making power grid improvements as Hurricane Season heats up. (NOAA via AP)

Just as powerful Hurricane Beryl is roaring in the Gulf of Mexico, Duke Energy Florida is shoring up its power grid in order to deal with hurricane season as it readies for the volatile months of August and September.

While Beryl has reached strengths of a Category 4 hurricane already, more powerful storms are expected to come. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) officials have already predicted 17 to 25 named storms this year. With that in mind, Duke Energy has put in place a storm response plan that involves resiliency and action plans that include 4,000 employees and contractors in Florida.

Duke Energy Florida officials say they’ve improved their emergency response and have learned from recent large-scale events following massive storms in the Sunshine State, according to a recent news release. Duke Energy Florida has about 2 million customers in Florida alone.

The company has made upgrades to its hurricane response plans and some of those are still in action with new plans and reviews from recent events.

During Hurricanes Ian, Nicole and Idalia, self-healing technology helped save more than 200 million outage minutes for Duke Energy Florida customers. More than 70% of Duke Energy Florida customers benefit from self-healing and automated restoration technologies.

The company plans to install hundreds of miles of underground cable in areas that are identified as the most outage-prone lines. Approximately 48% of Duke Energy Florida’s primary power lines are underground and better protected from wind damage.

Teams have completed more than 4,000 miles of maintenance trimming on Duke Energy Florida’s distribution lines and 600 miles of planned work on the transmission side.

And over the past three years, more than 40,000 poles have been hardened through a storm protection plan.

Additionally, the company is expanding capacity of the electric grid by building new substations, expanding existing substations and installing new or larger circuits to provide reliable service in the growing state. Duke Energy has completed optimization of eight substations, with another 38 in flight in Florida.