How dependable is electricity in Cape Coral?

On Friday, Karen Ryan with Lee County Electric Cooperative (LCEC) showed Fox 4's Cape Coral Community Correspondent Colton Chavez the blueprint of how much electricity she said Cape Coral could need in 2031.

“We ran at LCEC some predictive models to show what the load would be and you can see that this Burnt Store substation would be at 96% capacity,” said Ryan.

Ryan explained that less capacity means less growth for people and businesses looking to move into cape.

Tyler Karol works from home, for his business GovEx, and said he depends on electricity from LCEC.

“Since I work remotely, my business depends on me to be online every day talking to customers and colleagues if there is a day electricity goes down that puts me a day behind our competitors,” said Karol.

“So we have to be there before the growth gets there,” said Ryan.

On Friday, Colton Chavez asked how LCEC can curb the amount of power outages in Cape Coral.

“During the summertime with a lot of the storms, it will be down once a week,” said Karol.

“There really is no utility grid that is built for no outages,” explained Ryan.

Ryan said a grid without outages could be done, but it would mean higher prices on customers' electric bills.

“Would you like to have underground powerlines? The answer is always yes. Would you be willing to pay this much additional? (they say) no, not really,” said Ryan.

Ryan said currently, 25.8 % of the total LCEC power grid is underground.

She said in some places it makes more sense, but in coastal areas, not as effective.

So that's why new sub-stations like the one on Kismet Parkway West are how Karen Ryan said LCEC is keeping up with the growth.

“We just energized it this year and what that did is now when you look at 2031 you can see the Kismet substation is at only 48% capacity,” said Ryan.