St George Island

As the St. George Island community continues to grow, we must upgrade and expand the energy infrastructure to power the community. Duke Energy is working hard to make sure that the energy infrastructure connecting the St. George Island communities to the electric grid can reliably serve customers now and in the future. Improvements, such 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 other improvements to help ensure service remains reliable now and in the years ahead.

Various phases of the work along roads will include temporary traffic flow changes and potential temporary road closures. Large utility and construction equipment, as well as utility crews, will be present in work zones. Planned outages, while unlikely, may be necessary to complete certain projects. We will notify affected customers prior to any planned outage.

In some instances, crews will also need to work in our right of way behind a customer's home or business to access a power line or other equipment.

This project will be in progress throughout 2022. Work will be conducted in phases, and we will share updates on project milestones and next steps.

Easements will be required for some customers on Targeted Undergrounding projects.  If your property is included in an undergrounding project and an easement is needed, you will receive a separate postcard notification and a Duke Energy representative will reach out to you.

In the cases where we reroute your service line or upgrade the meter base on your house, you will be asked to sign a Customer Acknowledgement Form before we complete that work to connect your property to the new  underground line. The form is available for you to review and submit online. After submitting, you can print for your own records.

For portions of the project, crews will need to access overhead lines and equipment located behind homes and businesses. This work may require access through gates or fences. 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 pre-work conditions.

We are making strategic improvements to the power grid on St. George Island to 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 the energy use and tools to save money.

We are conducting many improvements on St. George Island, 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 improve reliability for customers
• Increasing substation and line capacity in fast-growing areas of Franklin County 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.