Florida Power & Light has 12 million customers to look after and responding to a hurricane continues to be a top priority.
"In Florida, it's not a matter of if a hurricane will strike, but a matter of when," said FPL spokesman Conlay Kennedy. "It only takes one storm to upend our communities and change our way of life."
Storms of the past have helped shape the grid of the future. Hurricanes Francis, Jeanne and Wilma from 2004 and 2005 changed the current and forced this behemoth electrical company to harden the entirety of electrical lines and implement new smart technology. Historic investments have made the grid smarter, stronger and more storm resilient.
"It's all about trying to send the right resource at the right amount of time to go ahead and get somebody to the right location," said Justin Klocman, who manages FPL's Distribution Control Center. "Prior to having this technology out, we would have to drive out and take a look and physically put eyes on the entirety of our power lines, to figure out where the fault was."
More than 40,000 smart devices collect and report back data into a state-of-the-art room. The devices talk to each other and determine where there's a fault.
In the past, it would have taken days to restore power. Now, it can be just a matter of hours with smart grid technology tracking outages. Every address in the five-county viewing area can be located on screens in this control center. They know when your power is out as soon as your lights flicker.
"After Hurricane Irma in 2017, where we saw a lot of destruction to our overhead system from wind-blown debris and trees contacting lines and falling into lines, that's when we really started focusing on putting the existing overhead lines underground," said Robert Gaddis, director of FPL's underground program.
FPL said 45% of power lines in its system across the state are now buried. It's common for most new communities to bury 90% of their lines. Another common sight is replacing old wooden poles with concrete ones. In fact, the last wooden power pole will be replaced very soon.
Kennedy admitted that no grid is hurricane-proof, so customers should be prepared to be without power if a hurricane strikes.
However, constant improvements are always studied and implemented to turn the lights back on faster.
"How do we learn more about the grid, and even today we're learning more and more and more on how our grid operates," said Klocman.
