WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — FPL is making sure its team of nearly 3,000 employees are ready for hurricane season and they're showing how new technology is being used to better prepare ahead of storms.
Experts at both Colorado State University and AccuWeather are predicting an active hurricane season.
One of those predictions show 11 strong storms, with five of them having the potential to become major storms.
"We are prepared for hurricane season, and that's a part of our year round process," FPL spokesperson Jack Eble said.
Eble said FPL prepares for hurricane season all year long. Thursday's drill is a way for them to get the message out to Floridians to be ready and be safe.
This year, WPTV is learning more about FPL's smart grid and restoration spatial view. It's technology that allows engineers to see exactly which meter in any part of the state has damage and how to get power back as quickly as possible. The grid is made up of 215,000 devices spread out throughout the state, making it easy to pinpoint outages and reroute electricity to impacted areas.
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Using this technology, they've been able to prevent 13 million outages since 2011.
"What this technology does is, it puts that function, that communicating with those smart meters into the palm of our engineers hands," Eble said. "When a crew is out in the field, they can touch this light bulb. This is going to be the line and this is how they're going to figure out if a customer has power, can receive power or cannot."
FPL said the smart meter communicates with multiple diagnostic centers around the state of Florida.
"We're able to take the function, the communication, all the technology that we have inside this building on the road," Eble said.
FPL said even the strongest grids are not storm proof, which is why they're making sure their employees are trained and that they can restore power quickly if a catastrophe happens.
