Florida still has a bit of a hangover from Tuesday’s massive mid-afternoon blackout. Florida Power & Light, along with state and federal regulators, are still trying to figure out why a small switch fire triggered a blackout that left millions throughout the state without power.
- Two nuclear reactors at Florida Power & Light’s Turkey Point power station remain off line, according the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Both reactors shut down at 1:09 p.m. Tuesday due to “momentary power fluctuation caused by grid instabilities,” according to an NRC report. The Juno Beach utility will keep the units off line in order to conduct some additional maintenance, said explained FP&L spokeswoman April Schilpp. “We’ll keep you posted, but we don’t have a time now for when it’s going to return to service,” Schilpp said. The utility had 475,000 customers without power at the height of the blackout, and almost all had power restored by early Tuesday evening.
- Tampa Electric had about 50,000 customers lose power Tuesday. Most had power within an hour, and as of 4 p.m. Tuesday, everyone affected by that incident was back on, said spokeswoman Laura Duda. There may have been other, weather-related outages. Tampa Electric also lost two small natural gas units that shut down automatically because of unsafe fluctuations in the electric grid. Both were brought back online quickly.
- Progress Energy said that 152,903 customers lost power, said spokesman C.J. Drake. Most had power within 77 minutes of the outage, and all customers had power by 3:37 p.m.
- The North American Electric Reliability Corp., which sets and enforces electric reliability standards throughout North America, said a total of 2,700 megawatts of generation were lost, along with 15 transmission lines. That’s nearly 5 percent of the state’s winter capacity. The system shed about 4,000-megawatts of load, or about 950,000 customers throughout the state.
- Asjylyn Loder, Times staff writer