When a storm finally moves out, all attention tends to turn to one thing: power. Florida Power and Light says restoring it as quickly as possible is its central mission in those moments. Even though South Florida has not seen a direct hurricane landfall in years, the utility insists it is constantly looking for new ways to get the lights back on faster for its customers.
The motivation is simple enough, since no one wants to be left without power during a storm, least of all for days on end. Florida Power and Light says it is squarely focused on shortening that gap and restoring service sooner and sooner. The proof, the company argues, can be found in the work it has carried out across the grid over the past two decades.
Among the most noticeable of those improvements is the steady effort to bury or reinforce existing power lines. That work is part of what the utility calls its storm secure underground project, an initiative that began in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma, when the damage left across the region underscored just how vulnerable the overhead network could be to powerful winds.
Since the initiative started, the scale of the change has been considerable. About 2,000 miles of power lines have been relocated underground across the state, a shift the company says improves the resiliency of the grid in those areas. By doing so, FPL argues, it is able to operate more efficiently and to make the total grid as a whole far more resilient against the next storm.
The company points to recent storms as evidence that the strategy pays off. FPL reports that its underground lines performed between five and 14 times better than overhead lines during Hurricanes Debby, Helene and Milton in 2024. That kind of gap, the utility says, translates directly into fewer outages and a quicker path back to normal once the weather clears.
Not every line can be buried, so the main power lines that remain above ground are being reinforced with either concrete or steel. The aim is to keep poles from being knocked over during storms, which in turn leads to quicker repairs. As the company explained, restringing a wire onto a sturdy concrete pole is far faster than having to put up an entirely new pole from scratch.
Taken together, the upgrades now cover most of the network. About 85 percent of the main power lines in the FPL service area are either reinforced or buried underground. The remaining stretches are where the company says much of its future hardening work will be focused.