When Hurricane Milton made landfall Oct. 9 as a Category 3 storm on Florida's Gulf Coast, its path of destruction led straight through the middle of Duke Energy Corp.'s Lake Placid Solar Project.

"Duke Energy is in the process of securing the site and cleaning up the damage left behind," a company spokesperson told S&P Global Commodity Insights in an Oct. 16 email.

The 45-MW solar farm opened in December 2019 in Highlands County, Florida, and is colocated with Duke's 18-MW/34-MWh Lake Placid Battery Energy Storage System, which is also offline.

"The batteries on site have not been impacted," the spokesperson said. "However, we have disconnected the site from the grid until the cleanup is complete. In the coming days, whatever portion is operable will be reconnected. Duke Energy has sufficient energy to meet customer demand."

While about 165,000 electricity customers in Florida remained without service as of Oct. 15, Florida's solar fleet has largely bounced back following Hurricane Milton and Hurricane Helene, which made landfall as a Category 4 storm Sept. 26 in Florida's Big Bend Gulf Coast region.

But there is still some ways to go to full recovery for Florida's solar power plants.

'Pretty resilient to hurricanes'

Florida's utility-scale solar fleet produced 7.3 GW at its peak on Oct. 14, compared with the Oct. 8 peak output of less than 4.4 GW, US Energy Information Administration data showed. As of the end of August, Florida had about 9.7 GW of nameplate utility-scale solar capacity.

"It definitely looks like Florida's solar fleet was able to ride through both hurricanes without losing significant capacity," said Thomas Hancock, a Commodity Insights senior research analyst. "Solar installations in Florida seem to be pretty resilient to hurricanes, even if their contributions to the grid are limited during the hours of impact. This outcome should reduce any anxiety regulators may have had about the ability of solar facilities to stand up to hurricane conditions."

Hancock said the hurricanes might have affected the 2.5 GW of solar projects listed as under construction.

"I'm curious if all of these projects will still come online as expected or if there will be a number of delays to the online dates," Hancock said.

"During Hurricane Milton and other recent power challenges, clean energy technologies perform strongly when the grid is under stress," said Elise Caplan, vice president of regulatory affairs at the American Council on Renewable Energy.