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It took weeks to patch up the power grid after hurricanes Helene and Milton. Some customers who suffered long power outages wonder why the grid isn't built for the future, especially as climate change fuels more powerful storms. But making high-voltage lines harder to blow down is expensive. And as NPR's Frank Morris reports, building a fortress around the power grid isn't likely going to solve the problem.
FRANK MORRIS, BYLINE: Almost a week after Milton, Charles Edward, who lives a few blocks from the coast in Largo, Florida, was still waiting for electricity.
CHARLES EDWARD: Been kind of hard to function for me because I'm a very, very organized person, and I'm just feeling out of it. Like, there's nothing you can do but wait (laughter).
MORRIS: The 50-year-old houses in this neighborhood were built to stand up to a Category 3 hurricane like Milton, and most weathered it fine. But climate change is making storms stronger. And neighbor Missy Kracher says she wishes the power lines here were as sturdy as the houses.
MISSY KRACHER: I mean, underground utilities would definitely be a good idea to not have to worry about this in the future.
(SOUNDBITE OF HEAVY EQUIPMENT CLANKING)
MORRIS: Crews like the ones working to restore Kracher's power have been future-proofing the grid for years. Jeff Brooks with Duke Energy says the big high-voltage line carrying juice into Largo now hangs on steel poles instead of more fragile wooden ones, for instance. But he says that, even in hurricane-prone coastal Florida, power companies are not trying to build invincible networks.
JEFF BROOKS: There's a lot of talk about hardening and hardening, and that is essential. But resiliency - the idea of making a system that can recover and adapt quickly - is just as important, if not more important.
MORRIS: Brooks says monitors and circuit breakers, like the traffic camera-sized gizmos hanging on poles in this neighborhood, make the system more pliant.
BROOKS: So a lot of our focus has been on installing smart, self-healing technologies.
MORRIS: Technology that's constantly detecting problems and finding ways around them, the way GPS navigation on your phone adjusts when you miss a turn. Brooks says these updates prevented hundreds of thousands of outages in the recent storms. Jon Wellinghoff, a former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, agrees the grid needs to be more flexible. But he says that loading the lines with new technology isn't always worth the money. It happens, though, he says, because state-regulated power companies are guaranteed a return on capital investment. When they spend money on the grid, they are certain to make money.
JON WELLINGHOFF: So they are not incented to provide better service. They're not incented to be more efficient. They're not incented to reduce costs or reduce rates to consumers. They're incented to spend money, and that's what they do. They figure out how to spend money.
MORRIS: Spending it to fortify the grid against climate change is a good justification, but Wellinghoff says global warming isn't the only challenge. Now the grid has to collect juice from far-flung solar arrays and wind turbines. Customers are increasingly generating their own power and storing it. That's a good thing, according to Wellinghoff. He says a decentralized power grid will be harder for storms to knock down. So customers could get more for the money they're spending on electricity.
WELLINGHOFF: Yes. But the fundamental thing we have to change to make all that work is that financial incentive for the utility to do the right thing.
MORRIS: According to Wellinghoff, that would mean changing the way electric rates are figured state by state. So instead of power companies profiting from building stuff, they'd make extra money by hitting certain performance goals - that is, making the grid work better.
Frank Morris, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHARLIE PUTH SONG, "LEFT AND RIGHT (FEAT. JUNG KOOK)") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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