51st Street Substation

As Florida continues to grow, we must upgrade and expand the energy infrastructure to power the community. Duke Energy is working hard to help ensure the energy infrastructure serving the St. Petersburg and Gulfport communities can reliably serve customers now and in the future. Improvements such as substation upgrades, as well as new and upgraded power lines, will help increase electric capacity in the area to sustainably support this growth. 

In addition to growth, Duke Energy wants to make sure that all customers enjoy the same high level of reliability and service. A recent reliability analysis identified locations that could benefit from new smart technologies, pole replacements and upgrades, vegetation management and other improvements to help ensure reliable service now and in the future.

Based on technological advancements and extensive outage data analysis, this Duke Energy work is planned with the goal to strengthen the power grid to help improve reliability and resiliency for our customers.

An easement will not be required from most property owners as most of the work will be conducted on substation property, road right of way or existing easement areas. However, if an easement is required for your project, a Duke Energy representative will contact you.

A road right of way is county property between your property line and the road. It provides legal access for pedestals, poles, power lines, transformers and other utilities. Private cable locate services will be used to avoid disturbing utilities that are already underground such as water, sewer, septic, etc.

For portions of the project, crews may need to access overhead lines and equipment located behind homes and businesses. This work may require access through gates or fences. If your meter base is not compatible with the new line, construction crews may need to install an adapter, or an electrician will contact you to schedule the installation of a new meter base. We will notify property owners in advance if such access is required.

Most of the neighborhood work being conducted involves overhead equipment and should not create impacts to customer property. In areas where underground equipment is being installed, crews will restore the area to as close as possible to prework conditions. Additionally, site restoration and improvements will occur as part of the completion of the Fifty-First Street Substation project.

We are making strategic improvements to the power grid in St. Petersburg to help increase reliability, strengthen the grid against severe weather and other threats, expand innovative technologies like solar battery storage and provide customers with more control over their energy use and tools to save money.

We are conducting many improvements in St. Petersburg, such as:

• Pole and line upgrades to strengthen the grid against outages from severe weather
• Self-healing technologies that automatically detect power outages and reroute service to restore power faster
• Additional energy pathways and smart technology around critical areas of the city, such as uptown, the airport and hospitals, to provide new tools to avoid outages and restore power faster when outages occur
• Reliability improvements in areas that have experienced a higher number of outages
• Strategic undergrounding of outage-prone line segments to help improve reliability for customers
• Increasing substation and line capacity in fast-growing areas of St. Petersburg, Gulfport and the region

In addition, Duke Energy customers in the area can access new tools and options through their smart meter, including hourly and daily usage information, to help better manage energy use and save money.

Learn more about the ways Duke Energy is working to build a better energy grid in Florida.