By John Dorschner
Finally
acting on a long-advocated idea, Florida Power & Light is installing
underground power lines in Davis Harbor and dozens of other Miami-Dade
neighborhoods.
Davis
Harbor is east of NE 10th Avenue, roughly between 86th
and 91st Streets, just south of Miami Shores. The area is prone to power
outages and buried cable has long been known to make the grid more reliable,
especially during storms.
Makes sense, right? Well, FPL balked for years. It said burying lines was too expensive and not worth it. “Not a silver bullet,” was the utility’s media mantra. Then, after a wave of storms in 2004 and 2005, FPL changed its tune.
“We love
underground!” the head of FPL announced in 2005. It offered to bury lines
underground if the neighborhood paid 75 percent of the cost – which could still
run into many millions of dollars, with each homeowner being responsible for
$10,000 to $30,000, depending on the source of the estimate. Very few places
took the utility up on the offer.
FPL Rethinks in 2018
After storms
repeatedly tore down power lines, FPL reconsidered. In 2018, it received
approval from the Public Service Commission to start the Storm Secure
Underground Program, targeting areas that experienced the most frequent
outages.
And who’s
paying to bury the lines? We all are. The average FPL customer is forking over roughly
$2 a month, under a trial program that expires at the end of this year. The
idea – and it makes sense – is that the grid is interconnected, and weak areas
can impact everyone.
Statewide,
many hundreds of neighborhoods have been converted to underground. In
Miami-Dade alone, FPL reports, 127 projects have been completed, with 198 more
planned for 2022.
Davis Harbor is especially fortunate. A low-lying area near Biscayne Bay, it has quite a few homes worth close to a million dollars or more. Much of the area is unincorporated and uses septic tanks. Under a new Miami-Dade County program, the area is getting attached to the sewage system – without homeowners having to pay for the hookup.
“How did we get so lucky?” one resident emailed me. “Connect
to Protect AND Storm Secure Underground Program, both paid for by
everyone. We'll take it/them.”
Among other Dade locations getting underground are
parts of Hialeah and Pinecrest. (The priority list is approved annually by the
PSC so that the utility can’t be pressured by local pols to get their areas
moved up the list.)
FPL
offers to coordinate its burial – lines snaked underground rather than through
trench-digging – with telephone and cable companies if they want to
participate.
Underground
for all utilities has been a trend for new construction for a long time. Often,
local governments insist upon it – for reliability and appearance. Developers
include their cost in the prices of the houses. Older neighborhoods, however,
were long ignored.
THE TOWN OF TIGER AND CELINE
Fifteen
years ago, when I was covering FPL for The Miami Herald, underground was a big
goal for quite a few places after horrific outages of a series of hurricanes in
2004 and 2005, including Wilma.
In 2006,
I wrote a front-page story that led with Jupiter Island, a town where the
average home then cost $3 million. Golfer Tiger Woods and singer Celine Dion
had homes there.
The mayor was Charles Falcone, a veteran power company executive from the Midwest. The unreliability of the town’s electric system astounded him. “I’ve never seen such a miserable power supply,” Falcone told me.
Starting
in 2000, Falcone pressured FPL for buried lines. After seven years of struggle,
the utility agreed to bury 8.5 miles of line in Jupiter Island to assist 625
homeowners.
According
to the Palm Beach Daily News, the cost was $8.5 million. Jupiter Island
borrowed the money, paying it off over 20 years, meaning it was like a mortgage
starting with a principle of about $13,500 for each home – chickenfeed for the
town’s expensive houses.
Residents
say the buried lines greatly improved reliability.
Almost
everywhere, in fact, where power lines have been put underground, people praise
the new system. In the past, FPL warned that if the buried tunnels got flooded
or damaged, they took longer to repair than above-ground lines, but I’ve seen
no reports indicating that’s been a problem.
With the
Storm Secure pilot coming to an end this year, it sure makes sense to me that
the program be extended.
More info
-- https://www.fpl.com/reliability/storm-secure-underground-program.html
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