Florida

The city of Hallandale Beach, Florida is in the news this week after becoming the only municipality in the state with a fully electric transit bus fleet.

Florida legislature is about to ban offshore wind turbines in state waters, which wouldn’t be put there to begin with, to protect the beaches.

Duke Energy is piloting a floating solar farm in Florida – its first – on an existing cooling pond in Polk County.

The city of Lakeland, Florida, has approved 77 homes featuring solar and storage that will be linked together to form a community microgrid.

Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL) just turned down $377 million in free federal energy-efficiency money despite Florida suffering ever-hotter temperatures.

Hertz announced today that it plans to add up to 6,000 rental EVs to its existing fleet in Orlando for leisure and business customers, as well as rideshare drivers.

A Florida state senator told the state’s Department of Transportation that he thinks EVs could run out of charge and block traffic during hurricane evacuations.

Solar contractor SALT Energy has installed a rooftop solar system in Florida that’s now the state’s largest rooftop solar system, as well as its largest privately owned solar project.

Auckland, New Zealand-based Invisible Urban Charging (IUC), which offers “end-to-end charging as a service,” is going to roll out more than 6,000 EV chargers in Florida, mostly at commercial sites and parking lots.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis (R) vetoed a bill, which the state’s Republican-majority House and Senate passed, that would have slashed rooftop solar credits in the state. It would have denied many homeowners net metering in the Sunshine State, and harmed its solar industry.

State legislators in Florida have approved Florida SB 1024 and HB 741, which would require future rooftop solar panel owners to pay higher rates and curb net metering. Yesterday, solar workers traveled to Tallahassee and let legislators know what a terrible idea they think these bills are.

Today Ultra-Yacht announced its first-ever All-Electric Duffy Boat featuring a solar charging option at the St. Petersburg Power and Sailboat Show in Florida. The Duffy Bayshore 18 is a zero-emission, low-maintenance boat that offers up to 12 hours of fun on the water.

Between 2022 and 2025, 27.3 gigawatts (GW) of new natural gas-fired capacity is scheduled to come online in the US, boosting its existing capacity of 489.1 GW as of August 2021, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). Here’s where it’s headed.

The Florida Power and Light (FPL) Company’s Manatee Energy Storage Center, the world’s largest solar-powered battery system capable of powering Walt Disney World for around seven hours, is now 75% complete.

Florida utility Tampa Electric Co. has announced it will retire three coal units and double its solar output within two years. That’s good news, but in an interview published last week, its CEO doesn’t mention the fact that the vast majority of its power comes from natural gas or whether it plans to transition away from the methane-producing fossil fuel.

Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL) just signed into law SB 1128/HB 919, “Preemption Over Restriction of Utility Services,” which was pushed through the legislature. It prevents local governments from deciding which energy path they want to take. In other words, Florida towns and cities are now unable to switch to 100% clean energy because they can’t ban fossil fuels.

Duke Energy Florida has announced that it will build two more new solar farms in the Sunshine State. This time, they’ll be in Citrus and Hardee counties.

The utility reported in February that it is investing an estimated $1 billion to construct or acquire a total of 700 MW of solar farms from 2018 through 2022 in Florida and will more than quadruple the amount of in-service solar on the system over the next four years.

Florida’s Turnpike plazas will be getting fast charging stations, as the state recently introduced its mitigation plan from its share of the Volkswagen Dieselgate settlement.

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Florida Representative Holly Raschein has sponsored a new bill in the Florida Legislature to fund a $10 million pilot program installing solar panels and energy storage at strategic public facilities to keep them up and running during critical events and natural disasters.

The program would start on July 1, and run for a single year. The Florida Solar Energy Center (FSEC) will administer and report on the outcomes, with potential expansion.

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State of Florida law states only an approved and regulated electric utility is allowed to sell electricity to the public. The 1988 court case, PW Ventures, Inc. v. Nichols, clarified this position. With Tesla’s SolarCity announcing that they’ll service customers of Duke Energy and the Orlando Utilities Commission in the greater Orlando area, they’ll have to abandon their ‘solar lease’ model in Florida – a state with no solar incentives.

In this model, Tesla owns the solar power system and takes all incentives, then sells the homeowner discounted electricity in a 20-year contract. With a population greater than 20 million people, the third largest state is a ripe opportunity – and maybe a laboratory.

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Despite its “Sunshine State” nickname, Florida ranks among the lowest states for solar power deployment thanks to anti-solar regulations backed by local electric utilities. But on election day, the citizens of Florida showed interest in solar energy by rejecting the anti-solar Amendment 1, which according to solar installers, including SolarCity, would have made it easier for utilities to add fees to make solar more expensive for customers.

Following the election, Tesla’s SolarCity is the latest solar installer announcing an expansion in Florida today now that it will become economically viable for a lot more households to install solar arrays on their homes.
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