Last year’s weather, wildfires heighten utilities’ storm hardening efforts
Last year’s weather, wildfires heighten utilities’ storm hardening efforts
21 May 2018
Published by https://www.utilitydive.com/
USA – Utility systems have come under attack from storms, trees, squirrels, fires and firearms.
Last year was particularly bad for outages with wildfires in California and a trio of hurricanes that racked up record damage in Texas, the Southeast and Puerto Rico.
Utilities are taking measures to address the threats, but the number of outages has been slowly creeping up, as have the number of people affected by outages.
When Hurricane Harvey slammed into the Texas Gulf Coast on Aug. 25, 2017, it left about 280,000 people without electricity. The storm took out six 345 kV transmission lines, 91 138 kV and 138 69 kV circuits, and also knocked out about 10,000 MW of generation, according to a report by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.
When Hurricane Irma hit Florida on Sept. 10, it affected customers in all 35 counties that Florida Power & Light serves, a total of 4.4 million of the utility’s nearly 5 million customers. Miami-Dade County was hit hardest. At one point, more than 815,000 people, or 80% of FPL accounts in the county, were without power. In Palm Beach County about 70% of accounts lost power. And in Broward County about 68% of accounts experienced outages.
SOURCE: Eaton’s Blackout Tracker
Last year’s storms spurred several utilities to strengthen their grids, but investment in grid hardening efforts have been on the rise for well over a decade, spurred by events such as the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and Hurricane Sandy in 2012, which inundated the Eastern Seaboard.
That is seen in the rising levels of utility investments in transmission assets, as reflected in an EIA Today in Energy article earlier this year. Transmission spending has increased steadily as utilities have invested building, upgrading, and replacing poles, fixtures, and overhead lines. In 2016, total transmission expenditures by utilities reached $21 billion, according to Ventyx Velocity Suite data assembled by the Energy Information Administration.
Wooden poles and buried lines
FPL has spent more than $3 billion since 2006 on grid hardening measures, spokesman Bill Orlove told Utility Dive. Every eight years FPL inspects all of its 1.2 million utility poles and replaces those that do not meet strength standards, he said.
Areas closer to the expected hurricane paths, such as Palm Beach, are replaced with concrete poles. Areas further north are replaced with wooden poles. Power lines are also replaced and spans between poles are shortened. FPL has also strengthened more than 860 main power lines and intends to strengthen all its main power lines over the next five to seven years.
So far, those efforts appear to have paid off. When Hurricane Wilma hit Florida in 2005, more than 12,400 of FPL’s power line poles were damaged. In Irma, that number was down to 4,600.
“During Irma we saw those investments pay off by shaving days off our restoration times,” Orlove said. One day after Irma hit, FPL had restored power to half its customers. During Wilma that took five days, he said.
