3 -- It manages this balancing act primarily by keeping costs down. Its operations and maintenance costs are 42 percent below the industry average, its website boasts.

Low prices and low costs generally make consumers happy. But now, after five major hurricanes hit FPL's operating area in a 15-month stretch, leaving many in the dark for days or weeks, customers are starting to wonder if there's something wrong with this picture.

Legislators, mayors, consumer advocates and many angry customers are all taking a new look at South Florida's 80-year-old power company. They want to know how it's been performing, particularly whether it has been scrimping on maintenance, causing unnecessary outages after storms hit.

The utility's executives maintain FPL has done a good job. They point to a study they commissioned from KEMA, a Dutch consulting firm, which showed FPL's system standards meet or exceed all requirements. The KEMA study said wind, not faulty maintenance, was the reason for such lengthy outages after Wilma.

Some veteran FPL workers dispute how well the system has been maintained. Dick Gagnon, a lineman who retired in Brevard County last year after 38 years of service, says FPL once had regular programs that replaced worn-out equipment. Then, in the early 1990s, it switched, tending not to replace transformers, poles and such until they broke down.

FPL Vice President Geisha Williams, in charge of the company's distribution system, says ''that's unacceptable'' for any supervisor to let a storm take care of maintenance.

She says new technology -- infrared cameras checking for weak spots in lines -- have made it cheaper and easier to do maintenance without spending a lot of money.

Still, some critics, including consumer advocate Mike Twomey, have wondered whether FPL lets bad equipment fail during hurricanes because that way the replacement will be paid out of storm fund surcharges, granted by state regulators, rather than out of its own operating expenses, which would eat into its profits.

The company says that theory is simply false, but executives do acknowledge the history of FPL over the past quarter-century has been a struggle of juggling costs and quality.

In the early 1980s, the juggling began when FPL became concerned it might start facing competition and deregulation, as happened in the phone system with the breakup of Ma Bell.

Under Chief Executive Marshall McDonald, FPL decided its best defense was to diversify. A new holding company, FPL Group, branched into insurance, cable TV, cement manufacturing and citrus groves.

At the same time, the company began an almost obsessive quest to win the Deming Prize, an annual award from Japan honoring the highest quality firm in the world. No company outside Japan had ever won the prize. The quest, led by John Hudiburg, president of the utility, pushed virtually every employee.

But it also led to major improvements, including in one important industry benchmark: average lengths of outages per customer, which fell from 100 minutes annually in 1982 to 52 minutes in 1988.

Customer complaints dropped to their lowest level in 10 years, and firm surveys showed the percentage of customers who were ''extremely satisfied'' climbed from 41 to 62 percent.

Meanwhile, some of the firm's new acquisitions were financial disasters. In 1989, James L. Broadhead, a phone executive, was named CEO. His mission: Cut costs.

Later that year, FPL won the Deming -- an enormous achievement -- but by the time the victory was announced, the executive who had organized the effort, Hudiburg, had been forced toward retirement.

But that workforce was slashed. Broadhead dumped most of the money-losing nonenergy businesses, and he cut 4,000 utility workers, a quarter of the FPL workforce, from 1991 to 1995.

Broadhead's moves reshaped the organization. ''It fundamentally changed the way we did business,'' says Williams. The management structure shifted from a geographic base -- a general manager for a local area -- to one focused on function, so that one person, for example, was responsible for power plants, regardless of location.

Still, quality clearly suffered. Outages per customer, which had fallen down to a low of 33 minutes in 1991, multiplied four-fold, to 137 minutes in 1997, according to the numbers the utility provided the media at the time.

Olivera says outage measurements over the years are not quite comparable, because they measured slightly different concepts, but he agrees quality took a big hit in the mid-1990s, and according to some measures climbed to 150 and 160 minutes of annual outages per customer.

Still, these outages were considerably higher than during the Deming era, and it's not clear what happened to the other important quality measurement -- consumer attitudes. The Miami Herald recently asked FPL if the company still conducts customer attitude surveys and, if so, what they showed. FPL didn't provide an answer by deadline.

Indeed, their rates are lower than many other utilities. According to some rates provided by the Edison Electric Institute, a trade organization, FPL's total charges for 1000-kilowatt/hours of $92.01 in 2005 were considerably better than the average New Jersey rate of $99.76, the New York average of $122.82, the PECO Energy average of $135.13 in Pennsylvania and the $156.40 of Pacific Gas & Electric in California.

Electric utilities have their prices set by regulators because they are monopolies without competition. In Florida and most states, regulators determine a company's ''reasonable and prudent'' costs, then allow a profit on top of that.

Twomey, who was a PSC lawyer in the mid-'80s and worked on FPL rate cases, says that during the 1980s FPL had just completed a lot of new generator construction, including a nuclear plant in St. Lucie County, and all those costs were included in its rate base.

This customer growth -- and the fact that the average FPL consumer uses 1.5 percent more electricity each year -- meant that revenue soared while operations and maintenance costs were kept down.

In fact, as FPL executives like to point out, not only has the utility not had a rate increase in 20 years, but in 1999 it lowered its basic rates by 6 percent and again in 2002 by 7 percent.

However, Charles Beck of the Office of Public Counsel, which represents consumers before the PSC, says, ''The reductions just didn't come out of nowhere.'' FPL's profits had increased so much that consumer advocates were threatening to demand the PSC have hearings to reduce FPL's rates, and the utility took a preemptive strike.

In return for cutting rates, FPL won an important concession -- its profits would not be subject to a rate-of-return ceiling. Instead, over a certain threshold, it would share revenue with customers.

''Wall Street hates limits on returns,'' says Twomey. Indeed analysts generally look well upon FPL. Debra Bromberg, an analyst with Jefferies & Co., says FPL is ''regarded as one of the better-run utilities.'' She mentions ''cost-control'' as a primary factor.

Last year, because it was planning a new round of power plant construction to meet continued growth in its customer base, FPL asked for a full-blown rate hearing to get an additional $430 million from consumers.

That move ended in a compromise, with FPL agreeing to freeze its basic rates for four years. In return, it was allowed to boost profits by eliminating some costs, such as $20.3 million annually it had been contributing to a storm fund reserve to pay for damages from hurricanes.

Basic rates, however, account for only 35 percent of a customer's bill, most of which are various surcharges. Consumers this month are feeling a special pain from one of these, the energy surcharge, which soared 19 percent for residential customers and 30 percent for businesses.

At present, according to PSC documents, FPL has a return on equity of 12.68 percent. That's 35.9 percent better than the state's second largest power company, Progress Energy, which earns a 9.33 percent return.

And it's 20 percent higher than the national average of 10.54 percent return on equity authorized by state regulators in 29 rate cases last year, according to Regulatory Research Associates.

FPL President Olivera says the company's healthy profit is due to the steadily growing number of customers and tight controls on expenses. ''We have a very strong focus on managing costs and managing capital.'' He emphasizes FPL's simple organization chart, without ''a lot of layers,'' and smart spending of operations and maintenance money.

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