Reliability Continues to Climb for FPL Customers

Florida Power & Light (FPL) continues to take steps to improve the reliability of its electric service, and the results of these efforts have been tremendous – the company claims to have improved its reliability by an eye-popping 45% over the last 10 years.  This includes a 58% improvement for customers in Northwest Florida that were acquired in 2019.  Not bad for a utility located in a climate-threatened hurricane zone!

How FPL has Improved the Reliability of Its Electric Service

First and foremost, FPL measures reliability based on multiple metrics, including average amount of time customers experience an outage, average number of service interruptions per customer, and the average number of flickers per customer.  Keeping tabs on these metrics has prompted FPL to deploy a number of different enhancements over the years to improve them.

According to FPL’s CEO Eric Silagy, the company’s overarching objective when it comes to reliability is “to build a stronger, smarter and more storm-resilient energy grid and continue to yield tangible benefits in good weather and bad.”  The projects FPL has deployed to accomplish this goal since 2005 include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Replacing wood poles with poles made from steel or concrete.
• Hardening infrastructure that serves critical facilities.
• Launching a comprehensive pole-inspection process.
• Deploying nearly 200,000 smart devices across the grid to detect and prevent outages.
• Optimizing vegetation management practices along the company’s 26,000-mile power line infrastructure.
• Undergrounding power lines – over 600 such deployments have been done through the end of 2021.

All told, FPL is clearly doing the right thing by taking steps to maximize service reliability for its customers.  The numbers bear this out, and the improvements are even more impressive when you consider the climate within which the company operates – extreme heat and humidity, a lot of lightning that creates power surges, coastal flooding, hurricanes, etc.

Well done, FPL, well done!