Florida Power and Light switch should power improvements

The new automated lateral switch was in place on Wednesday morning and Richard Britt, a Florida Power and Light senior lineman, was smiling.

"This allows us to be more efficient," he said while standing along the 4100 block of 45th Street East in Bradenton. "It makes me more available to do significant work."

Eve McConnell, a spokesperson for FPL, said the Smart Grid devices can actually detect when a service outage, perhaps caused by something as simple as a falling branch or a palm frond, is close to taking place and can avoid that outage.

FPL has spent more than $6 billion since 2006 in making its power grid more efficient in its 35-county area. The bottom line for consumers is that FPL makes far fewer maintenance trips with the new technology and that savings is passed along. 

The company estimated its customers in 2015 benefitted from more than $46 million in operational savings from Smart Grid technology investments. During the past five years, FPL has improved service reliability to its Manatee County customers by more than 25 percent.

Wednesday's task involved removing the old hundred amp dropout switch and replacing it with the new automated lateral switch.

"This is a game-changer," McConnell said. "These switches can detect a power outage before it occurs."

The new switches are installed on smaller neighborhood power lines. The power line on Wednesday serves William H. Bashaw Elementary School and the surrounding neighborhood, which includes about 2,600 homes and businesses.

In 2016 in Manatee County, FPL plans to upgrade nine main power lines to help communities recover more quickly following storm outages. FPL also will clear tree limbs and vegetation, a common cause for "power flickers," from 540 miles of power lines. It will install 42 automated switches on main power lines and 204 automated switches on smaller power lines serving neighborhoods and subdivisions.