President Joseph Biden is traveling to St. Petersburg Sunday to visit areas that suffered damage during Hurricane Milton and Hurricane Helene.
During the visit, he will formally announce $94 million in funding to Florida utilities for Department of Energy projects to help improve the electric grid for future storms.
Gainesville Regional Utilities will receive half of that funding, with $47 million to assist with storm hardening and tools to more quickly reconnect power during outages.
The utility and its customers were most impacted during Hurricane Helene in late September. Tropical storm-force wind gusts helped to disable power for over 67,000 of its 100,000 customers. It took a week for the utility to restore power to each of them.
Hurricane Milton did not have as severe an impact in Gainesville, with only a few hundred GRU customers losing power, but statewide there were over 3 million outages after it made landfall Wednesday night.
The federal funding is part of $612 million in Department of Energy disbursements to regions impacted by the storms through its Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) program.
Florida Power and Light is also receiving $47 million to partner with a New York-based company called Switched Source. The utility will use its new funding to “improve reliability on circuits serving communities that are most susceptible to prolonged outages,” according to the White House’s announcement.