TAMPA, Fla. — Power companies are asking for thousands and thousands of {dollars} to enhance storm resiliency within the occasion of main storms and hurricanes throughout the state.
It’s an annual ask from companies that year-round are working to harden the power grid and replace applied sciences used to maintain the power on.
What You Need To Know
- Power companies are asking for thousands and thousands of {dollars}
- Three main Florida power companies asking for extra funding to upgrade its system
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- Power companies are additionally upgrading their grids
“To do the amount of work that’s needed to keep the lights on during a storm, is something that requires time and attention 365 days a year,” stated Ana Gibbs, spokesperson for Duke Energy.
Duke is amongst three main Florida power companies asking for extra funding to upgrade its system.
Duke is asking for $142.8 million in funding.
Tampa Electric says it wants $53.55 million.
Every 8 years, each power pole within the state wants to be inspected by its power firm.
That means for Duke vitality, it inspects round 100,000 power poles yearly, protecting 4,500 line miles.
Power companies are additionally upgrading their grids and implanting “self-healing” know-how.
It provides redundancy to the power grid, so if one line of transmutation goes down in a storm, the system can revert to a special line, successfully bypassing the power break till it may be repaired.
“The know-how now exists the place our grid can re-route round itself, round a tree which will have hit our line and diminished the variety of clients which are impacted by an outage.”
Duke Energy says in 2021, self-healing know-how helped save the corporate from as many as 250,000 particular person power outage occasions, and saved clients from 17-million minutes of power outages.
The final main storm that affect Florida was Hurricane Irma in 2017.
Irma knocked out power to greater than 6.7 million clients, greater than 60% of your complete state.