Florida’s electric utilities and state leaders are warning of a devastating blow to the power grid as Hurricane Milton churns toward the Tampa Bay region, which just recovered from Hurricane Helene.
Milton is on track to thrash the Tampa area as soon as Wednesday — potentially as a Category 4 or 5 storm, which could make it the first major hurricane to directly hit Tampa in more than a century. Helene slammed into Florida’s Big Bend region nearly two weeks ago, knocking out power to millions of customers across the U.S. Southeast and hundreds of thousands in and around Tampa.
Now, widespread Florida power outages are on the horizon again.
Duke Energy had just finished rebuilding infrastructure to Florida’s barrier islands just west of St. Petersburg on Saturday, according to spokesperson Ana Gibbs. She said the company anticipates needing to rebuild again after Milton. The latest hurricane from the Gulf of Mexico could bring maximum sustained winds of 155 mph and up to 15 feet of storm surge.
“When I say rebuilt, this was an area where we had equipment washed away [in Helene],” Gibbs said. “This was large equipment that could serve 10,000 customers. That area’s underground equipment was completely washed away.”
Electric utility providers up and down Florida’s West Coast are warning customers to expect to lose power for days. Florida Power & Light CEO Armando Pimentel said customers should be prepared “for the very real potential of widespread, extended outages,” according to a statement this week on the company’s website.
Tampa Electric, which provides power to roughly 840,000 homes and business around Tampa Bay, also warned of extended outages. The company said people who rely on electricity for health needs should be prepared and have backup power arrangements ready.
Utility spokesperson Kim Selph said there were about 100,000 outages at the peak of Helene, and that Tampa Electric has already mobilized more than 4,500 utility workers from as far as Texas and Minnesota to help with restoration efforts after Milton.
“This is the largest deployment [Tampa Electric] has ever organized for hurricane recovery, underscoring our commitment to getting the lights back on as soon as we safely can,” Selph wrote in an email.
Scott Aaronson, senior vice president for security and preparedness at Edison Electric Institute, which represents investor-owned electric utilities, said a force of 36,000 utility line workers from around the U.S. and Canada began heading to Florida on Tuesday.
Many of those crews were pivoting from grid restoration in the Carolinas and Georgia following Helene, which brought devastating flooding as well as high winds to the Southeast. Helene killed at least 230 people, according to the Associated Press.
More than 80,000 homes and businesses in North Carolina remained without power as of Tuesday night, according to PowerOutage.us, while more than 40,000 customers lacked electricity in Georgia.
“While the rebuild in the Carolinas continues, crews are also being allocated to emergency response in Florida,” said Aaronson, who also serves as one of three staff executives of the Electricity Subsector Coordinating Council, an emergency response committee of senior industry and federal government officials.
Aaronson said that emergency stores of poles, wires and other essential grid equipment were increased after Superstorm Sandy, which struck the upper mid-Atlantic coast in 2012. “At this point, we have the material and equipment to rebuild after Helene and address whatever damage comes from Milton,” he said.
Gibbs with Duke Energy said the company still has a stockpile of materials to help rebuild after Milton.
“We keep a different storage of materials specifically for hurricane season, which will be able to sustain this type of storm,” she said.
But executives of utilities hit by extraordinary hurricanes in the past decade have cautioned that capital required to protect the grid and recover from catastrophic storm damage is limited by their customers’ willingness and ability to cover the costs.
Outages also are expected beyond the Tampa Bay region of Florida, as Milton is expected to travel across the state from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean.
“While it is difficult to predict the full extent, multi-day outages are anticipated, and flooding is a concern,” the Orlando Utilities Commission said Tuesday in a news release. The electricity and water provider said it was “increasing restoration resources to five times the normal size to respond to outages caused by the storm.”
The fate of electric vehicles also will be watched closely once Milton hits, as some EVs’ lithium-ion batteries have previously caught fire after being flooded with salt water.
On Tuesday, the city of Tampa posted on the X social media platform that all cars can park for free at any city garage until at least Friday at noon. But it added that “EVs must park on the third level or higher.”
Lessons learned
Florida’s power grid has served as a national model for resilience and repairs after natural disasters for the past couple of decades.
Many of the improvements were born after Florida’s 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons, said Ted Kury, director of energy studies and the Public Utility Research Center at the University of Florida.
In 2004, four hurricanes occurred in August and September, causing widespread power outages across the state that lasted for weeks in some cases. The following year, three hurricanes and a tropical storm affected the state.
The Florida Public Service Commission launched a series of workshops after those hurricane seasons, in an effort to identify best practices and ways to prevent future power outages in the event of back-to-back hurricanes. Among the most important, Kury said, was new, required information-sharing that now takes place annually among the state’s municipal and investor-owned utility providers.
“The utilities go through ‘This is what we’ve done over the last 12 months to make the grid more resilient, this is what we’re planning going forward, and these are things we have done that have made a difference,’” Kury said.
In recent years, some of those best practices have included so-called self-healing technologies that can reroute electricity away from damaged lines and other pieces of infrastructure.
Kury pointed to an instance that occurred during 2016’s Hurricane Matthew, when a storm surge damaged one of FPL’s substations in eastern Florida. That self-healing technology allowed workers to remotely isolate the substation and reroute power around it, Kury said, limiting impact to the system. FPL did not return a request for comment Tuesday.
Gibbs with Duke Energy said similar technology was deployed during Hurricane Debby in early August of this year.
“Just like GPS for cars can reroute around traffic, we can reroute around a tree falling on a line, and the system does that automatically,” Gibbs said.
That technology avoided about 12 million minutes of potential outages during Debby in early August and close to 200 million minutes of outages during Hurricane Ian in 2022, Gibbs said.
The Florida workshops that occurred years ago also led to the creation of a more standardized pole inspection cycle for utilities across the state, said the University of Florida’s Kury, meaning that utilities are required to inspect about a fifth of their poles every year.
That means infrastructure even in areas like Tampa, Sarasota and Bradenton, which have not been directly hit by a hurricane in decades, have had infrastructure updated.
“In a lot of cases, utilities are switching from wooden poles, especially in areas where they are afraid of wind events, and swapping them out with composite material poles that are more resistant to wind and falling trees,” Kury said. “That’s been employed across the state even in areas where they didn’t necessarily see direct impacts from a storm.”
‘Kind of an army’
Despite updated infrastructure and information sharing, Milton’s impact on the grid could be catastrophic.
“The challenge we run into is there’s really no way to completely isolate electricity infrastructure from interaction with the environment,” Kury said. “Aboveground lines are more susceptible to wind events — flying debris and falling trees — and underground infrastructure runs the risk of water incursion. There’s just no way to make our infrastructure completely immune to any interaction with the environment.”
Duke Energy has lined up 16,000 crew members from across the country, stationed in places that won’t likely see heavy impacts from the storm, Gibbs said.
“When we bring that kind of an army in, it’s the equivalent of preparing for more than 1 million outages ahead of this storm,” Gibbs said.
A contingent of 400 line crew members from Pacific Gas & Electric flew out of California last Friday to help restore service in Georgia. Their utility trucks left before them, loaded two and three at a time on trailers and driven across the U.S.
A decision was later made that workers “would head to Florida ahead of Hurricane Milton to be pre-positioned to help Florida Power & Light with restoration,” said PG&E’s Matt Nauman.
The dispatch of line crew workers to repair storm-devastated utility networks is managed by industry-established regional organizations, with the power companies receiving help for reimbursing donor utilities for workforce and material costs.
PG&E, for example, determined that it could provide the 400 crew members without risk to its operations.
