Florida Power & Light, the state’s largest electric utility, is wrapping up its annual storm drill ahead of hurricane season.
The demonstration allows the company to stress test their systems, new technology, and improve how the company serves customers during hurricanes and other severe weather, said FPL officials.
The drill, a mock Category 2 hurricane affecting most of FPL’s service area, is “critical,” said Florencia Olivera, a spokesperson for FPL.
Hurricane Season officially begins June 1st.
Michael Jarrow, Vice-President of Power Delivery, told WLRN that upgrades, like concrete poles and 2,000 miles of underground power lines, have increased the utility's ability to keep the grid standing during a major hurricane.
“The best way to engineer it out was bringing things to the front of the property and then also going underground, and it's proven to be 5 to 14 times better,” Jarrow said.
“Particularly in the 2024 storm season, the underground system performed that much better than the overhead system," he said.
The move has had long-term benefits. Much of the electrical infrastructure sat behind homes beneath a heavy tree canopy, where trimming is limited.
Jarrow said Category 5 Hurricane Irma in 2017 gave FPL “a reality check.”
“So what happens is those trees topple over, they bring the lines down, and it causes that cascading effect,” he said.
READ MORE: 2026 Atlantic hurricane season guide
Underground systems avoid that headache. And “ we have about 85% of our grid that has been storm hardened.”
Officials used the drill to publicly encourage residents and visitors to prepare their supplies now in the event of hurricanes and increasingly strong tornadoes.
The annual storm drill is one of several ways FPL prepares for hurricane season.
It features year-round storm-readiness efforts, including FPL’s Mobile Command Center, which is often stationed in hard hit areas to assess damage, flood-resilience tools like substation flood monitors, and coordination inside the company’s Command Center and control rooms during the drill.
During the demonstration, officials said AI enhancements to their systems have also improved response times. FPL uses FPLAir One, a drone the size of a small plane, along with smaller everyday drones, to survey neighborhoods and rural areas.
To date, officials say it has captured over 1 million photos to help crews inspect electric infrastructure, speed up storm restoration, and spot problems before outages happen.
“We can get to areas that we could never get to by foot,” he said. “But the real beauty is where we're injecting AI, taking the images that the drone technology or the lidar technology provides us and turns it from insight to action within minutes.”
