In response to hurricanes Helene and Milton, President Joe Biden has allocated $94 million in federal funds to Gainesville Regional Utilities and Florida Power & Light to help restore power throughout the state and reinforce the electric grid.
The funding, which is part of a larger $612 million allocation, has been divided among “six new cutting-edge projects to support communities impacted by Hurricane Helene and Milton,” according to a press release from the White House.
On Sept. 26, Hurricane Helene made landfall in the state as a category-four storm, severely impacting Florida’s Big Bend region. Almost two weeks later, Hurricane Milton impacted the state as a category-three storm Oct. 9, affecting the state’s west coast and central regions.
In total, Hurricane Helene left more than 3 million residents without power, while 187,339 residents still face power outages post-Hurricane Milton as of Oct. 15.
To address these issues, Gainesville Regional Utilities plans to use $47 million of recently allocated federal funds to help mitigate the effects of storms in north central Florida “through storm hardening, as well as faster restoration through the deployment of self-healing devices and tools that will enable more efficient and precise dispatching of field teams during outages,” the White House said in a statement.
Meanwhile, Florida Power & Light will use the remaining $47 million to work with utility technology developer Switched Source to deploy Phase-EQ, which optimizes power flow in distribution circuits. That technology "will unlock over 200 MW of system capacity and improve reliability on circuits serving communities that are most susceptible to prolonged outages,” according to the White House.
“This funding will not only restore power, but it’ll make the region’s power system stronger and more capable, and reduce the frequency and duration of power outages while extreme weather events become more frequent,” Biden said during a press conference Oct. 13 in St. Pete Beach.
More information about these efforts can be found online.
Biden Allocates $94M in Federal Funds to Florida Post-Hurricane Milton
Gainesville Regional Utilities and Florida Power & Light will use the allocated funding to update and improve the state’s electric grid in response to extreme weather events, such as Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton.
Image courtesy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
