Dear Valued Customer,

As I reflect on the past couple weeks, I am reminded of the first line in the Neil Young song “Long May You Run”: “We’ve been through some things together.” The past three weeks have tested our community with Hurricane Helene, bringing the coastal storm surge that affected so many of our customers, and Hurricane Milton, packing hurricane force winds, heavy rain and latent flooding. As it turned out, even though the eye made landfall in Siesta Key, Hurricane Milton was the most powerful storm to impact West Central Florida in over 100 years. On behalf of everyone at Tampa Electric, I hope you and your loved ones stayed safe during both of these hurricanes. We genuinely appreciate your patience and support in the aftermath of this historic storm season. We know many suffered damage to their homes and businesses, and our hearts go out to you. Together, we will face these challenges, and we are committed to supporting the communities we serve as you rebuild and recover.

A Sincere Thank You

Our dedicated team, along with over 6,000 utility workers from the U.S. and Canada, responded to more than 600,000 outages at the peak of the storm. We restored power to nearly all customers by Thursday morning and continued working around the clock to ensure every affected customer was back online, including those with complex issues. We deeply appreciate the unwavering support of our community partners; their teamwork was essential in clearing roads so we could access equipment and begin repairs, ensuring the safety of our team, providing us access to the locations where we set up eight base camps to operate from and providing shelter and resources for those in need. We also want to thank the visiting crews whose expertise and strong work ethic were vital in accelerating the restoration process. Their grit and tenacity were evident, especially as many of them joined us right after restoring power elsewhere, following Hurricane Helene.

Moving Forward Together

As always, our mission at Tampa Electric is to deliver safe and reliable energy to our community. We are continually enhancing our infrastructure and response capabilities to improve our resilience against future storms, and actively investing in new technologies and initiatives that will allow us to pinpoint outages more quickly and accurately. Though we’ve made great strides over the past several years, we remain committed to further improvement. This includes continuously upgrading our systems to provide real-time outage updates and ensuring you receive proactive notifications during emergencies. We look forward to continued improvements to our system as we move forward.

In addition, we remain dedicated to strengthening our infrastructure. Obvious questions that customers might ask after a storm like Milton is “Why did so many customers lose power?” or “Did the current state of the electric grid play a role?” Tampa Electric’s electrical grid is robust. Fifty-two percent of our power lines are already underground and protected from the winds. The portion that is above ground consists of 267,000 poles. Only a handful of those poles failed because they could not withstand Milton’s winds. Unfortunately, for the large oak trees that paint our skyline, it was a different story. Thousands of large oaks fell, and as they fell, they took poles and wires down with them. Our experience with Milton has prompted us to carefully reevaluate our approach to tree trimming, considering how we can best protect the electrical grid while also being mindful of our community's love for trees. We recognize the important role they play in enhancing our environment, and we are committed to finding a balanced solution that prioritizes both the resiliency of our grid and our natural landscape, especially during severe weather events.

Knowing that we cannot completely eliminate this risk, we will continue to relocate existing overhead lines underground through our Storm Protection Plan. Through this program, we are investing $150 million annually over the next decade to enhance the resilience of our power grid. This includes moving ~100 miles per year of existing overhead wires underground, replacing the 2,300 remaining wooden transmission poles to either steel or concrete, adding flood protection to low-lying substations, and better managing trees to reduce outages and restoration times. Severe weather from a system like Hurricane Milton only underscores the importance of these investments.

Resources For You

As recovery continues, we encourage you to visit TampaElectric.com/Updates for a list of organizations offering assistance with recovery efforts. Please also remember that hurricane season continues through Nov. 30. We recommend taking the following steps to stay prepared:

• Visit our Storm Center to familiarize yourself with emergency and storm resources. 
• Connect with us on social media for real-time updates on the latest developments. 
• Be aware of scams and fraudulent activities because scammers strike when we are distracted. 
• Enroll in outage notifications to be aware of outages and restorations affecting your service. 

Thank you again for your patience and support. Your trust in us is paramount, and we are dedicated to ensuring that you can rely on us, even in the most challenging circumstances. We remain committed to serving you and building a stronger, more resilient community together.

Be well. And as Neil said, long may you run.

Sincerely,

Archie Collins
President and Chief Executive Officer
Tampa Electric