FPL plans to bury Coral Gables powerlines over 30 years

By Abraham GalvanAfter nearly three years of discussions, workshops and negotiations with Florida Power & Light (FPL), Coral Gables is moving forward with the Storm Secure Underground Pilot Program for electric power.

FPL plans to seek approval from the Florida Public Service Commission (PSC) to convert all remaining above-ground neighborhood lateral lines, poles and individual residential and business service connections citywide to underground.

Stantec, the city’s consultant heading the project, updated officials during the last city commission meeting on where undergrounding of electric and communications utilities throughout Coral Gables stands now.

The PSC approved the Storm Secure Underground Pilot Program for only 10 years and the city acknowledges that FPL can only formally plan to convert 40% of the remaining overhead lateral neighborhood lines, poles and individual residential and business service connection lines to underground, said Ramon Castella, Stantec’s vice president.

FPL plans to pursue timely PSC approval to convert the remaining 60% of overhead lateral neighborhood lines within 30 years and complete overhead hardening of above-ground main feeder lines within five years.

Up to 15% of the feeders being hardened may involve conversion from overhead to underground, Mr. Castella explained. FPL will work with the city to find the opportunity to convert main feeder line sections along signature streets, like Bird Road and Old Cutler Road, where engineering and vegetation management issues validate the need for undergrounding rather than overhead hardening, he said.

“The city is avoiding costs that would have exceeded $240 million for the citywide FPL conversion,” he said, “and there is no need for bond issuance that would have cost property owners thousands of dollars every year for 30 years.”

Major benefits and improvements include electric reliability, in that the frequency and duration of outages should improve by 60% to 90%; the electric conversion will be “turn-key” for the city; FPL will manage the project and lead communications with individual property owners; conversion will involve directional boring without the need for major excavations; and there will be minimal adverse effect on tree roots, he said.

The city continues to analyze a 2021 state law addressing pole attachments that might apply to AT&T and Comcast lines and attachments to FPL poles and see whether communication infrastructure could be undergrounded also, Mr. Castella added. “This remains an open issue and we plan to report back to the city commission with further information and recommendations.”

This initiative has been a long time coming and the commission has been working to address the issue, Mayor Vince Lago told city officials.
“We want to work on redundancy. We want to make sure that people who are the elderly, most sick, and who have had power issues do not have to go through outages again,” he said. “We discussed and went down the road of doing this privately. We looked at numbers around $275 million to $300 million for the entire city.”

After having multiple meetings with FPL, Mayor Lago said both the city and the power utility company have done a lot of planning and legwork.
“We want to take the city to the next level. We want to be as sustainable as possible and continue to upgrade our infrastructure,” the mayor said. “This is a huge win for the city. This will cost the city residents zero dollars and there will be no referendum.”