Florida Power & Light Company Wins Award for Outstanding Reliability Performance in the Southeast U.S. for Fourth Consecutive Year

NEW ORLEANS, Nov. 30, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Florida Power & Light Company (FPL) was named the winner of the 2017 ReliabilityOne™ Award for Outstanding Reliability Performance in the Southeast U.S. by PA Consulting Group, Inc. This is the fourth consecutive year the company has received the award.

"It's an honor to receive this prestigious award for the fourth straight year," said Eric Silagy, president and CEO of FPL. "It's a testament to the hardworking men and women of FPL. All 9,000 employees who make up this great company have an unwavering commitment to deliver reliable electric service our customers can count on in good weather and bad. In fact, their dedication – coupled with the more than $3 billion dollars we've invested into the energy grid since 2006 – has improved service reliability over the last five years by 25 percent. I am proud of the job they're doing but know that we are never satisfied. We will continue to learn, and implement new and innovative ways to further improve reliability for our nearly 5 million customers."

FPL was also awarded the Outstanding Response to a Major Outage Event award for its Hurricane Matthew restoration.

Since the historic 2004-2005 hurricane seasons that culminated with Hurricane Wilma, FPL has invested billions of dollars to build a stronger and smarter energy grid, and these investments have benefitted its customers by enabling the company to restore power more quickly. Most recently, Hurricane Irma impacted more than 4.4 million customers across all 35 counties in FPL's service area. The storm's size and strength created an unprecedented restoration effort. Irma was significantly stronger and more devastating to the state than Wilma; however, the company was able to restore power more quickly following Irma, restoring service to 1 million customers before the storm exited the company's service area. After one full day of restoration, the company restored service to 2 million customers. Ultimately, FPL's investments to build a stronger, smarter energy grid helped shave days off the restoration – reducing the average customer outage time by approximately three days compared to Wilma. Additionally, during Hurricane Irma:

• All of FPL's substations were up and running within a day after the storm, compared with Wilma which took five days;
• A fraction of the number of poles were damaged in Irma compared with Wilma due to FPL's strengthening and hardening programs;
• Every hardened transmission pole – the backbone of the energy grid – withstood Irma's hurricane force winds, and main power lines performed significantly better than those that had not been hardened; and
• FPL's smart grid technology contributed to restoring service to thousands of customers even before it was safe for trucks to roll.

Along with its continued investments, the company continues to build a stronger, smarter energy grid by:

• Strengthening nearly 860 main power lines, serving critical community facilities and services, such as police and fire stations, hospitals, 911 centers, grocery stores and gas stations;
• Placing additional main power lines underground, bringing the total to more than 450;
• Clearing vegetation – a major cause of power outages – from more than 150,000 miles of power lines;
• Inspecting the company's 1.2 million power poles every eight years, and upgrading or replacing those that no longer meet FPL's standards for strength (approximately 150,000 poles inspected annually); and
• Installing more than 4.9 million smart meters and 83,000 intelligent devices to help predict, reduce and prevent power outages, and restore power faster if outages occur.

All large utilities operating electric delivery networks in North America are eligible for consideration for the ReliabilityOne™ Award. There are a total of seven regional awards including Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Midwest, Plains, Mountains, West and Southeast. The selection of provisional recipients is based primarily on system reliability statistics that measure the frequency and duration of customer outages. After provisional recipients are selected, each company undergoes an on-site certification process which provides an independent review and confirmation of the policies, processes and systems used to collect, analyze and report a company's reliability results.

"As companies strive to deliver the highest level of reliability to customers, the next generation of utilities must be resilient," said Gregg Edeson, PA Consulting Group's ReliabilityOne™ program director. "An outstanding example of the utility of the future, FPL proved again that it is committed to resiliency requirements and grid modernization in the face of probable storm/major event impacts and emerging distributed energy resources."

Florida Power & Light Company
Florida Power & Light Company is the third-largest electric utility in the United States, serving nearly 5 million customer accounts or an estimated 10 million people across nearly half of the state of Florida. FPL's typical 1,000-kWh residential customer bill is approximately 25 percent lower than the latest national average and, in 2016, was the lowest in Florida among reporting utilities for the seventh year in a row. FPL's service reliability is better than 99.98 percent, and its highly fuel-efficient power plant fleet is one of the cleanest among all utilities nationwide. The company received the top ranking in the southern U.S. among large electric providers, according to the J.D. Power 2016 Electric Utility Residential Customer Satisfaction StudySM, and was recognized in 2017 as one of the most trusted U.S. electric utilities by Market Strategies International. A leading Florida employer with approximately 8,900 employees, FPL is a subsidiary of Juno Beach, Florida-based NextEra Energy, Inc. (NYSE: NEE), a clean energy company widely recognized for its efforts in sustainability, ethics and diversity, and has been ranked No. 1 in the electric and gas utilities industry in Fortune's 2017 list of "World's Most Admired Companies." NextEra Energy is also the parent company of NextEra Energy Resources, LLC, which, together with its affiliated entities, is the world's largest generator of renewable energy from the wind and sun. For more information about NextEra Energy companies, visit these websites: www.NextEraEnergy.com, www.FPL.com, www.NextEraEnergyResources.com.

About PA Consulting Group
An independent firm of over 2,600 people, we operate globally from offices across the Americas, Europe, the Nordics, the Gulf and Asia Pacific.  We are experts in consumer and manufacturing, defense and security, energy and utilities, financial services, government, healthcare, life sciences, and transport, travel and logistics.  Our deep industry knowledge together with skills in management consulting, technology and innovation allows us to challenge conventional thinking and deliver exceptional results that have a lasting impact on businesses, governments and communities worldwide.  Our clients choose us because we don't just believe in making a difference. We believe in making the difference. For more information about PA Consulting Group, visit www.paconsulting.com. PA's ReliabilityOne™ awards are presented to electric utilities providing their customers with the highest levels of reliability in the industry. PA's ReliabilityOne™ study is based on standard industry reliability statistics that measure the frequency and duration of electric power outages and has been analyzing electric utility performance since 1987. For more information about PA Consulting Group, visit www.paconsulting.com/energy.

SOURCE Florida Power & Light Company

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