Lake Mary weighs underground power lines before hurricane season

Lake Mary is weighing whether the stretch of North Country Club Road between Lake Mary Boulevard and the Lake Mary Events Center should move underground before hurricane season puts the city’s power grid to the test.

City commissioners were set to vote on a binding cost estimate with Duke Energy at City Hall at 7 p.m., a decision that could turn one of Lake Mary’s more visible corridors into a storm-hardening project. The work is being pitched as more than a cleanup of overhead wires. Duke Energy says burying lines can reduce outages tied to downed trees, ice, high winds and other weather events, and the company describes the approach as targeted undergrounding for lines that are especially outage-prone or hard to reach.

For Kenny Armenta, who already lives in a neighborhood with buried lines, the case is straightforward. He told ClickOrlando that underground service makes sense because there are fewer things that can fall into the lines and power interruptions are less common. That kind of firsthand experience may carry weight in a city where hurricane season still shapes how residents think about reliability, even on a corridor that includes the Lake Mary Events Center at 260 N Country Club Rd.

Still, the financial side remains unresolved. The city had not publicly released the estimated cost of the conversion, so residents did not yet know what the project would cost or how the expense would be divided between Lake Mary and Duke Energy. That leaves the commission to decide not just whether the undergrounding is worth doing, but whether the reliability gains justify the bill.

Duke Energy Florida says the tradeoff is real. The utility says burying lines is not “a cure-all and doesn’t come cheap,” even as it uses undergrounding alongside pole work, wire upgrades and vegetation management to harden the system. The company says it serves about 2 million customers in Florida and that nearly 48% of its primary power lines in the state are already underground.

The timing matters. Duke Energy said it spent the years since Hurricanes Helene and Milton preparing year-round for hurricane season, mobilizing nearly 25,000 workers and resources when those storms hit. Most outages were restored within 72 hours, a reminder that even a limited undergrounding project on North Country Club Road would be part of a larger effort to keep Seminole County’s lights on when severe weather rolls through. If Lake Mary moves ahead, the corridor would gain a cleaner look and, city leaders hope, a tougher electrical backbone for the storms ahead.