Catherine Stempien President Duke Energy Florida
What advances have been made regarding the company’s clean energy projects in the region? We are still in the process of building 700 megawatts of solar in our system and that will be completed by 2022. We are making significant progress on that. We are either operating or in the construction phase for about half of those megawatts. We brought two new solar plants online in December, at Lake Placid and Trenton, and we have two being completed in the first half of this year in Fort White and DeBary, with two others just announced in North Florida. The other area where we have really made progress is in battery storage. We have said that we are going to build 50 megawatts worth of battery projects, and we have made announcements for three of these projects located in Trenton, Cape San Blas and Jennings. Often, people think about batteries as the connection between our solar farm and a battery. The battery charges when the sun is up and when the sun is down the battery discharges that energy. But batteries can do much more for our system. We have been testing a lot of cases for battery use, and the projects that we are going to be doing will help improve reliability for our customers, giving them more reliable power. How is the company ensuring customers get the energy they need? Our customers want power, and they want that power to stay on 24/7. We are midway through deploying our selfhealing grid technology. About 50% of Pinellas County is covered by this technology now. If you think about the electric grid as a highway system, when you have a traffic jam somewhere in that system you want Waze or Google Maps to redirect you around that traffic jam. The grid works the same way: if we have an outage, or a tree falls down on a line, you want to be able to redirect the power around that problem to make sure that people can get their energy. This technology does that automatically. We have sensors and communications devices all over our grid that automatically reroute the power and minimizes the problem, reducing the number of customers impacted. 82 | Invest: Tampa Bay 2020 | CONSTRUCTION & INFRASTRUCTURE
stormwater pump stations, pipes and other failing infrastructure. The initiative would be funded by increased water rates that could exponentially increase costs for the end users. In his proposal, DeSantis requested more than $625 million for environmental projects for Florida’s state budget, including $122 million for wastewater and stormwater grants. Another way St. Petersburg is funding sewer pipe repairs is by changing legislation that allows authorities to order residents to repair issues on their own property. But one initiative that is sorely lacking in Tampa’s water funding is public-private collaboration. Electricity The electricity sector has much more private sector investment, which is clear from the innovative initiatives being rolled out across the Tampa Bay region
118,400 out of 174,100 jobs in alternative energy were related to energy savings.
