Tampa Electric CEO and President Archie Collins joins Yahoo Finance Live to explain how Florida's power grid has been impacted by Hurricane Ian as millions are without power.

Video Transcript

- More than 2.6 million people are without power in Florida today as Tropical Storm Ian makes its way across the state. Now, more than half a million of those are in the Tampa Bay area, just north of where the storm made landfall Wednesday. Our next guest, CEO and President of Tampa Electric, Archie Collins, is working to restore power to many of those. He joins us now. Archie, thank you for joining us right now. So get us up to speed on the situation right now and what you're really dealing with in trying to get the power back on for these residents.

ARCHIE COLLINS: Good afternoon. It's great to be with you. The situation, quite frankly here, the situation in the Tampa Bay Area is one where we are dealing with a significant number of customers without power. But here in the Bay Area, quite frankly, we have been-- we feel we have been blessed. We're very grateful. We've missed the worst of this storm, which hit 50 miles to our south. And certainly the thoughts and the prayers of the residents here in the Bay region are with the folks down in Punta Gorda and Fort Myers, Port Charlotte, Venice, who really felt the brunt of Hurricane Ian.

- Archie, the outages that you are experiencing right now, how long do you expect these outages to potentially last?

ARCHIE COLLINS: It's difficult to say. But based upon the type of damage that we're finding as our teams have returned to the field today, obviously for us safety is number one. And we are hindered from really doing a lot of restoration or damage assessment during the highest winds. This morning when the winds receded, we had all our teams out there.

For the most part, what we are observing is limited infrastructure damage. We're not seeing any indication of storm surge. There's no indication of widespread flooding. And so for the most part, we expect that this will be a fairly quick, certainly days as opposed to weeks sort of restoration.

- Archie, as severe weather events become more frequent and, frankly, more ferocious, what are the lessons you're learning?

ARCHIE COLLINS: So as you can appreciate, here in Florida we view ourselves as being on the front line of climate change. This is a low-lying geography. It tends to be one of the first places that hurricanes that form in the Atlantic basin make landfall.

And for us it's forcing all utilities in Florida, together with our governmental partners and the consumer parties and regulators, really to come together and acknowledge that storms are becoming stronger. They're becoming more frequent. Electricity is more and more important in our everyday lives. And so the resiliency of the electricity grid is critical.

And so certainly here in Florida we've had lots of support from governmental and regulatory partners, supporting, strengthening our grid, moving our grid underground, adding flood protection to some of our low-lying assets. And that effort will continue. I think Ian has demonstrated the importance of increasing the resilience of the electricity grid as we know it.

- And how is that translating into the sorts of investments that you're making or that you would like to see being made when it comes to really reinforcing and improving the infrastructure down there for the grid?

ARCHIE COLLINS: The sorts of investments we're making are really in flood protection of some of our low-lying substations, a lot of underground. A lot of our distribution circuits that are overhead circuits and are, therefore, prone to being contacted from fallen trees, we are moving about 100 miles of that infrastructure underground on an annual basis. We're currently about 60% of our entire electrical network is already underground. And so we've already made really good progress within our service territory. But to really move the needle on resilience, we have more work to do.

As one point of pride, I think we have a very interesting data point to share. Within our service territory, we have a 37-home microgrid down on the southern fringes of our service territory that operates, can operate independently of the grid. And yesterday those 37 homes did become disconnected from the grid. All of their neighbors were without power. But those 37 homes rode through the entirety of Ian and never did lose their power. And so that kind of renewable-powered, microgrid, community-based sharing of energy certainly is something that we do think is something we'll see more of and adds an added layer of resilience and always-on capability that our customers are looking for today.

- Archie, when it comes to restoring the power that is out right now, the biggest challenge that you're presented with over the next couple of days?

ARCHIE COLLINS: The biggest challenge, really, in a state like Florida, where air conditioning is just so critically important, our effort is ensuring that we do this as quickly as we can, as safely as we can, meeting the expectations of our customers. For us it's quite a logistical challenge. We've brought in to the state, we get, in an instance like this, all utilities work collaboratively to share resources.

And here at Tampa Electric, we've augmented what normally would be a 300-person team on the line side of our business with around 3,100 workers that we've brought from either within the state or outside of the state. And so that's a logistical challenge to house them, to feed them, to ensure that they're used efficiently while they're here. So we have that challenge.

But we're up for the challenge. I think it's really important that utilities in Florida are trained, our employees are so well trained in emergency management and how to plan for and execute a very effective restoration in the aftermath of something like Hurricane Ian. So our customers can be confident that although there are a good number of them that are without power currently, we expect that quickly we'll be able to have most of them restored.

- Well, Archie, we wish you all the best. We'll be thinking of you. We thank you for all the hard work that you're doing right now for your customers. Archie Collins, at Tampa Electric president and CEO.