Duke Energy undergrounds 48% of Florida power lines with plans to expand as hurricane season peaks

(UI) – According to the National Hurricane Center, the peak of the Atlantic hurricane season is Sept. 10, with most activity occurring between mid-August and mid-October.

Hurricane Debby, a powerful Category 1 storm, made an early landfall in Florida's Big Bend on Aug. 5. During Hurricane Debby, Duke Energy’s self-healing technology saved more than 12.5 million minutes of customer total outage time and automatically restored more than 62,000 customer outages.

While a self-healing system can't repair the physical damage to the power line that a human crew must repair, it can reduce the number of customers affected by a power outage by up to 75% and can often restore power in less than a minute. More than 76% of Duke Energy Florida customers are served by this technology.

These investments enabled Duke Energy Florida to quickly restore power for 93% of its customers within 24 hours after Hurricane Debby made landfall.

During hurricanes Ian, Nicole and Idalia, self-healing technology helped save more than 200 million outage minutes for Duke Energy Florida customers.

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

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.

Over the past three years, more than 40,000 poles have been hardened through the Storm Protection Plan.

Additionally, the company is expanding the 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 12 substations, with another 50 in flight in Florida.

"We understand this work can be invasive and disruptive during blue sky days," Seixas continued. "We appreciate our customers' patience as our teams work to protect and improve the service that you, your homes, businesses, schools, public safety facilities and hospitals rely on every single day."

Duke Energy Florida, a subsidiary of Duke Energy, owns 12,300 megawatts of energy capacity, supplying electricity to 2 million residential, commercial and industrial customers across a 13,000-square-mile service area in Florida.

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