How One Florida Utility is Preparing for Hurricane Season
Image courtesy of Andy Roman under Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic Deed, resized to 700 x 391 pixels.
Now that we’ve officially entered the 2025 hurricane season (June 1st – Nov. 30th), it’s time to take note of some best practices around hurricane emergency preparedness. Specifically, today we’ll review some best practices from Tampa Electric Company (TECO).
And it’s a good choice – TECO’s track record since 2021 of reducing outage frequency (down 23%) and average outage duration (down 32%) certainly warrants peeking behind the proverbial curtain!
Steps TECO has Taken to Plan and Prepare for Hurricane Season
First and foremost, it’s important to understand that TECO utilizes a year-round planning process to make sure all preparations are optimized. This is necessary given its location and the fact that it operates about 12,000 miles of power lines and has 860k customers. It also has spent hundreds of millions of dollars each year to strengthen its system against severe weather.
Here is a bullet list of some of what TECO has accomplished in recent years to help the utility withstand a typical hurricane season:
- Conducted 37k utility pole inspections in 2024.
- Hardened/reinforced 1k poles in 2024.
- Replaced 450 transmission assets in 2024.
- Undergrounded 60 miles of lines in 2024 (overall, about 50% of the utility’s lines are already buried).
- Cleared vegetation and obstructions from over 3.3k miles of overhead lines in 2024 (overall outages caused by vegetation and overgrowth have declined 60% in the last 5-6 years, according to the company).
- Deployed “self-healing” technology that automatically reroutes electricity whenever it identifies potential issues or malfunctions.
- Enhanced its outage map technology.
- Launched a process to provide mobile safety orientation for out-of-state crews to accelerate the mutual aid onboarding process.
- Launched efforts to fortify low-lying substations against storm surge and flooding.
As you can see, TECO seems to have optimized its hurricane season preparedness. From an emergency planning perspective, we can learn a lot from this utility’s approach and dedication to the cause. I, for one, applaud the effort!
