FPL underestimated Irma online demand
Company is preparing for increased traffic following a hurricane.
Website crash. App with information not so apt. Trees that local governments don’t agree to cut back. Lines on 200,000 poles controlled by other companies with “not a big appetite” to strengthen them.
For all the successes Florida Power & Light cites in restoring power after the worst hurricane in more than a decade last year, executives acknowledge there are things the Juno Beach-based utility
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hopes to handle better, and things it cannot totally control, if catastrophic weather comes calling in 2018.
Take the company’s website that crashed after Hurricane Irma, and a phone app that didn’t always correctly show when the lights were back on for a given customer. If hurricane winds blow, FPL aims to be better prepared for a crush of traffic when nearly
every house and car now teems with countless phones, laptops and other gadgets hungry for information.
“One of the things we underestimated frankly is the number of devices we all own,” said Eric Silagy, president and CEO of FPL, at the company’s annual storm drill Thursday in Riviera Beach.
“We’re testing our system now at a much higher level,” he said.
FPL pointed to $3 billion in investments to strengthen poles and install smart-grid technology as a big reason it restored 50 percent, or more than 2 million customers who lost power, within one day after Irma. It took five days to get that proportion of customers restored after 2005’s Hurricane Wilma.
“Hurricane Irma was prec- edent-setting for our com- pany as we amassed the largest restoration force in U.S. history to get the lights back on for our customers,” Silagy said.
A growing automated army is joining the cause. The util- ity fielded 49 drone teams to survey damage after Irma, Silagy said. FPL’s first substation robot operates in Palm Beach Gardens, a mobile provider of images designed to show what’s ailing complex equipment.
People affected by the storm have more ways to get information than they did in Wilma’s day, and that’s a good thing, but an ever-expanding gadget supply places a big demand on the system.
One issue FPL officials mentioned to regulators in a Tallahassee workshop We d nesday was a need for a “thinner” app in the aftermath of a big storm. In that situation, people overwhelmingly just want to know when their house will have power, not a raft of data about next month’s bill, said Bryan Olnick, FPL’s vice president of distribu- tion operations.
FPL’s smart-grid technol- ogy is designed to identify when and where outages occur and ideally communi- cate that through the website and app, but under heavy traffic the system did not operate properly at times.
“Our mobile app system was up and running, but it was not providing the most accurate information some- times and that’s what we’re working on now,” Olnick told state Public Service Commissioners in a workshop on storm response.
Other concerns: FPL has been strengthening its 1.2 million poles, but its lines also run by agreement on about 200,000 poles con- trolled by other entities. Olnick called this a “weak link.”
He did not name names, but Public Service Commissioner Julie Brown asked, “Say AT&T owns a pole. Who has the authority to tell them to harden a pole? We don’t.”
Olnick said “somehow that discussion needs to take place,” saying he was not aware of a “big appetite” to strengthen that equipment by other companies.
An AT&T spokeswoman declined comment.
For its part, FPL wants to tackle the issue of “the wrong tree in the wrong place,” as falling vegetation remains the top cause of outages. But local govern- ments in its 35-county ser- vice area don’t always share the same priorities. Olnick said some are “planting trees right under our lines as we speak.”
One possible avenue to reduce outages: more under- ground lines.
These are not free from hazards such as tree roots and water. But during Hur- ricane Irma, only 18 percent of underground main power lines experienced an outage, compared to 69 percent of “hardened” overhead main power lines, meaning strengthened against storms, and 82 percent of non-hardened main power lines, according to FPL.
An FPL pilot program this year will probe cost-effective ways to bury lines, attempting to broaden the reach beyond developments that planned for such an arrangement during their construction.
Gov. Rick Scott joined Thursday’s storm drill, noting that Florida during Irma “mobilized the largest power restoration effort in our nation’s history. I was proud of the work of Florida’s utility providers who quickly restored power to our communities.”
The exercise involved a hypothetical Hurricane Cobalt, modeled on 1964’s Hurricane Isb e ll which had similarities to Hurricane Wilma. The pretend Cobalt made landfall on the state’s southwest coast May 2 as a Category 2 storm and departed the state around West Palm Beach. FPL evaluated how well employees responded.
“Our company has a culture of continuous improvement, and with that in mind, we must continue to push ourselves to improve our ability to respond,” Silagy said. “That’s what FPL’s storm drill is all about.”