If you have been dodging bucket trucks and backhoes in Pinellas County lately, you are not alone. Duke Energy has spent the winter taking overhead power lines off poles and putting them underground, while swapping out older, more vulnerable poles as part of a broader push to harden the local electric grid. The work pairs targeted undergrounding with automated grid devices that are supposed to shrink the size of outages and speed up restorations after storms or equipment failures. Neighbors in Clearwater and other Pinellas communities are already seeing heavy equipment on residential streets and brief, scheduled shutoffs as crews move from block to block.
Crews Are Burying Lines Across Clearwater and Beyond
As reported by FOX 13 Tampa Bay, Duke Energy is managing roughly 300 undergrounding projects across Pinellas County. In Clearwater, one of those projects kicked off about a month ago and is expected to wrap up in mid-March. The station notes that the company is also replacing traditional wooden poles with stronger, storm-resistant models, and officials are warning residents to expect planned power interruptions of roughly 30 to 60 minutes while the work is underway.
Utility Officials Say the Work Cuts Outages
“This is a big priority for us,” Aly Raschid, a Duke Energy Florida spokesperson, told FOX 13 Tampa Bay. Raschid said the hardening program is aimed at cutting outages during the daily drumbeat of afternoon thunderstorms and the more serious hits that come during hurricane season. According to the utility, roughly 90 percent of Pinellas County customers now benefit from automated self-healing equipment that can spot a fault and reroute power almost immediately, often limiting how many homes lose electricity when something fails.
Self-Healing Networks Trim Down Outage Times
In a Duke Energy News Center release, the company says its self-healing systems can often restore service in less than a minute. More than 1.7 million Florida customers, or about 82 percent of Duke Energy’s statewide customer base, now benefit from the technology. The company credited those investments with preventing hundreds of thousands of longer outages and saving millions of outage-hours during last year’s storms.
Big Bets and a Longer Plan
Duke Energy’s regulatory filings and annual report show the company invested more than $4 billion in hardening and grid modernization in 2023. That tally includes targeted undergrounding, smart switches and its Self-Optimizing Grid program. Company documents say those upgrades have materially reduced outage minutes across its service territories and are slated to keep expanding into 2026; the filings lay out the longer-term buildout in more detail.
What Neighbors Should Expect
For residents, the process is not instant. Depending on how complicated a neighborhood’s layout is, a typical undergrounding job can take one to three months from start to finish. Before digging, crews map out homes and determine the right size for underground cables. Once the work is complete, Duke Energy says the buried lines and upgraded equipment should mean fewer repeat outages and faster storm recovery for homeowners who have gotten used to flickering lights every time the weather turns ugly.
More Than a Local Fix
What is happening in Pinellas is part of a bigger national shift. Utilities across the country are increasingly turning to targeted undergrounding and grid automation as a resilience strategy, and in some places regulators have signed off on programs to help pay for it. Industry coverage points out that burying vulnerable distribution lines is becoming a go-to move in coastal and storm-prone regions; see Utility Dive for a broader look at how similar efforts are playing out elsewhere.
