IRMA: Florida's electric grid system outdated and inadequate to meet natural disaster challenges

Outdated power supply lines into most Florida/US homes

Is it the Category 3 Hurricane Irma that cut the power to more than 3 million Florida Power & Light customers, or an under-invested Florida grid system that caused these unacceptable power outages, with even more outages expected before the storm is done.

Outages stood at 3,636,550 customer accounts just after 5 a.m. Monday September 11, and were expected to increase throughout the night.

Including 492,980 customers whose power was at some point restored, outages have affected more than about 3 million accounts, or 6 million people in FPL’s 35-county territory.

The fact of all this drama is that both America's electrical hardware and software components are still dealing with "a legacy of under - investment."

Annual electrical transmission investment in the U.S. grew only about 24% in the past 15 years.

U.S. electricity reliability to homes is mainly still based on overhead pole supported wired systems, instead of one, like in most civilized countries in the world, which is laid underground.
 
Consequently the U.S. has significantly higher rates of power loss than countries like France (only 53 minutes lost per year on average) or the Netherlands (only 29 minutes)

In the case of Florida, FPL, the nation's fourth largest utility, already came under heavy criticism after Florida's spate of hurricanes in 2005, which exposed lax attention to maintenance issues, like updated power line poles, tree-trimming and what was widely considered an outdated grid system.

The latter may not have allowed for sufficient redundancy, or the ability to adjust to strains and funnel power via different routes.

And while not much has been done about fixing the power grid infra-structure,  many South Floridians have still been socked with bill increases of as much as $100 a month over the past years.

Critics argue that this is totally unnecessary for a profitable utility like FT to do,  since they have an increasing revenue stream, as a result of 125,000 or more new residents entering Florida each year.

But Florida, like the rest of the US has neglected its power infrastructure, and customers, unfortunately, are paying the price for this neglect.

"Isn't it time to do something about this Florida Governor Rick Scott".

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From EU-Digest