On October 2024, Hurricane Milton devastated parts of Central Florida, leaving hundreds of thousands of households without electricity, unable to keep warm, cook food, or even switch on the TV to get the latest weather updates. It was a different story in the city of Winter Park near Orlando where, at the peak of the storm, only about 275 of 15,000 customers—less than two percent—did not have power. The reason? Eighty percent of the city’s power lines are buried underground.
“Undergrounding” began in Winter Park about 20 years ago, with the goal of improving power reliability and aesthetics. According to City officials, about 95 of the 130 miles included in the project have been completed, and work is progressing at a pace of approximately eight miles per year.
“It’s like planning for retirement,” says Winter Park City Manager Randy Knight in a media interview following Hurricane Milton. “You have to go ahead and start. If you don’t start, you’ll never finish. And when something like this happens, we’re not spending a whole week on repairs. We spent 12 hours.”
Because Winter Park’s utility is owned by the CBity, it is able to provide the undergrounding service while maintaining rates that are below the average for Florida. And because the City has local control over its finances, it is able to reinvest all profits and revenues back into the system to pay for these undergrounding efforts, preventing an additional tax burden to its residents.
“Almost all of the outages we had after Hurricane Irma (in 2017) and this latest storm are related to the overhead part of the system, not the underground part,” explains Randy Kirby. “Investor-owned utilities in the state are obviously responsible to their shareholders for profits. But there are 33 municipal-owned utilities, including ours. Over the years, the community has made the decision on how we reinvest the profits.”
It would have been easy to take the extra revenue and build a park or redo City Hall, Kirby notes. But city commissioners who took over the power system from Progress (now Duke) Energy nearly two decades ago stayed committed to undergrounding.
Despite pandemic delays, undergrounding is expected to be completed in 2030 at a cost of about $8.5 million per year—a significant number for a city with a $200 million annual budget. These dollars are coming from the reinvested utility rate revenues.
When the project is complete in 2030, Winter Park expects to be the first city in America to have 100 percent of its electric lines underground, according to Kirby.