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rest of the grid, robbing potentially needy people of power during major outages. As- toundingly, state rules also mandate that solar customers include a switch that cleanly disconnects their panels from FPL’s system while keeping the rest of a home’s power lines connected. But during a disaster, FPL custom- ers aren’t allowed to simply flip that switch.
The law winds up forcing residents to remain reliant on the state’s private power companies. For now, solar-panel owners can still get something out of the law, in that the “net-metering” provision lets you sell excess power back to the company. But if power companies had their way, the net- metering law would vanish tomorrow.
Both FPL and its trade association, the Edison Electric Institute, have spent mil- lions trying to kill that net-metering law and instead win the right to charge you for installing your own solar-panel system.
In 2016, FPL spent more than $8 million on Amendment 1, a ballot initiative that
industry insiders admitted was written to trick customers into giving up their rights to solar power. The law’s language would have paved the way for Florida to kill net-metering rules. This past April, the Energy and Policy Institute caught an FPL lobbyist straight-up drafting anti-solar laws for Fort Myers state Rep. Ray Rodrigues, who also took a $15,000 campaign contribution from FPL this year.
FPL has also resisted some seemingly fool- proof solutions to avoid storm outages, such as burying more lines. In a city that names its sports teams for hurricanes, a huge portion of FPL’s power lines still sit above-ground and get blown apart even in tropical storm conditions.
The company’s stubborn stance on burying lines has been on full display in an ongoing fight over 88 miles of new power lines it wants to build connecting to the Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station in Homestead. That battle has dragged on for the better part of this decade, all because FPL has refused to bury lines. In 2014, the energy-friendly Gov. Rick Scott said FPL could move ahead with the project, but
local governments sued. This year, FPL and the City of Miami settled their suit, and the company agreed to bury five miles of lines as long as the city dropped the rest of its complaints. The settlement mean a different, larger stretch of lines would re- main above-ground for the next 40 years.
Bigger picture, FPL has also resisted solutions that would cut down on its carbon footprint in a state dispropor- tionately affected by sea-level rise and climate-change-fueled monster storms.
Instead of funneling money toward those extremely basic fixes, FPL has instead forced the public to pay for massive fossil- fuel and nuclear-energy plant upgrades. The company hiked rates by more than $811 million last year to build a back-up natural-gas power plant and urging state regulators to hand the company a blank check to build two new nuclear reactors at Turkey Point. Those upgrades don’t re- ally help when power lines are blown to shreds, and both plants will end up spew- ing carbon pollution into the air. Hurricane
INTRODUCING
Irma marks yet another moment to ques- tion whether Florida’s four regulated, private power monopolies make any sense in a world threatened by climate change.
According to a March 2016 news release announcing a rate hike, FPL has apparently been studying the damage major storms such as Wilma and Sandy caused to various electric grids. But residents are now still asking why, if FPL had a decade to prepare for Irma, most of Miami’s power grid went dead so quickly in Cat 1 conditions after
12 years of so-called resiliency efforts. The Tuesday following the storm, a New
Times reporter toured the Little River Mobile Home Park on NW 79th Street in Miami. Peter Jean, a jovial resident who grew up in Haiti, pointed at a busted-up jumble of power lines and said that in the early hours of Sunday morning, the lines snapped and sparked a small fire in the trailer park.
“Some of us tried to call FPL,” Jean said. “Nobody came. Even now, no one has come.”
Jerry.Iannelli@MiamiNewTimes.com
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