After Hurricane Ian devastated the state, crews are trying to restore — and in some cases, reconstruct — Florida’s electricity grid.
According to Eric Silagy, CEO of Florida Power & Light, 850,000 of the utility’s customers who lost electricity during the storm remained without power on Friday evening, while 1.2 million had power restored during the day.
Florida Power & Light claims to have enough poles, generators, and cable to complete the work. However, authorities in the power industry worry that kinks in the nation’s supply chain could hinder recovery if Ian does additional damage as it spins up the Atlantic coast, or if another natural disaster strikes someplace else in the United States.
Ian was one of the strongest storms to ever hit Florida’s Gulf Coast on Wednesday.
According to industry officials, there is a nationwide scarcity of distribution transformers, which take power from high-voltage lines and decrease it to levels suitable for usage in homes and businesses.
Silagy stated earlier this week that the company had set aside enough generators in the months preceding Ian’s arrival to perform repairs.
“It’s a vital component of the electrical grid that has been in short supply for several months,” Joy Ditto, president and CEO of the American Public Power Association, said. “We recognised it as a national concern in late winter, early spring, and the situation is worsening.”
According to Ditto, it used to take around three months for a transformer to arrive after being ordered, but today it takes more than a year. She claims that this is limiting companies’ ability to stockpile boxes, and as a result, they are increasingly swapping boxes with utilities facing a scarcity.
There are perhaps a half-dozen transformer manufacturers in the United States that are experiencing labour and raw-materials shortages. According to Ditto, the biggest bottleneck is the speciality steel used in transformers, which has only one producer in the United States. Her organisation and the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association asked the Energy Department in May to postpone a 2016 efficiency standard that they claim is contributing to the steel shortage, but the request was denied. The Edison Electric Institute, which represents for-profit utilities, according to Scott Aaronson, is prioritising supply during storm and wildfire season.
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