Dorian missed us, but it will still cost you on electricity

Your electric bill is likely to go up to pay for Hurricane Dorian even though the storm never hit Florida directly and it left our electrical system intact.

Just getting prepared for Dorian will wipe out Florida Power & Light Co.’s estimated $105 million hurricane reserve, Eric Silagy, the utility’s president and CEO, said Tuesday.

For FPL customers, that could mean a storm surcharge on monthly bills. Silagy makes no apologies for bringing in more than 10,000 crews from out of state to help with Florida’s potential restoration from what was a Category 5 hurricane when it devastated the Bahamas. The state’s largest electric utility began releasing out-of-state crews on Sept. 3 as Dorian finally turned away from Florida’s coast and headed north toward the Carolinas.

“Waiting until after the storm is not an option unless people want to be out of power for several weeks,” Silagy said. “In this case, if the storm had hit us directly and we had not brought in crews, it would extend [power outages] even further.”

Hurricane Dorian ended up knocking out power to 155,000 of FPL’s 5 million customers, and power was restored within a day. While most of Florida never got hurricane-force or even tropicalforce winds, feeder bands and falling trees affected some coastal areas, FPL says.

How much bills could rise — and when — has not been determined. FPL has to submit the invoices to the Florida Public Service Commission to show its expenses for Hurricane Dorian before it can pass on a surcharge to customers. The Office of Public Counsel, which represents the consumer, will review the expenses to give its input on whether they are prudent.

J.R. Kelly, Florida’s public counsel, said his office “vets all the information, which is immensely time consuming. With [Hurricane] Irma, we went through the invoices to make sure they were reasonable. There was a lot of it that wasn’t and a bunch was disallowed.”

Ultimately, the Public Service Commission approved $1.3 billion in storm costs for Irma in July, almost two years after the hurricane. FPL customers didn’t see an extra charge on their bills because FPL had used its federal tax overhaul savings in 2017 to cover Irma’s costs.

Consumer advocates argued that FPL should have used its storm reserve and filed for a storm surcharge with regulators, so it could examine the utility’s expenses. The public counsel and other parties lost their fight in May to get FPL to return $772 million in annual federal tax savings to customers. The public counsel struck a deal with FPL over Irma’s storm expenses, getting about $50 million in costs reclassified and FPL agreeing to new tracking methods for contractor expenses.

Those tracking methods, including an FPL app to record line workers’ costs, were not ready for Hurricane Dorian, Silagy said.

The costs of additional crews during Dorian would have been higher if crews weren’t brought in from nearby states before a storm, Silagy said. FPL would have to reach out to utilities that are further away, such as Kansas or Wisconsin. That would result in longer road trips, two or more days, for the bucket trucks and another day to become productive, he said.

“Doing it in advance gives us the opportunity to move equipment down to where we think it’s needed,” Silagy said.

About 100 utility workers each can stay in Category 5 storm centers FPL has built around the state; others must be put up in hotels.

Because of the storm was over Labor Day weekend, crew time was even more expensive. “We had all these people here, plus over a holiday weekend. We had to pay double time,” Silagy said.

Silagy said he doesn’t think it will take that long for Dorian’s expenses, but he couldn’t say exactly when the utility might file.