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Progress Energy has backtracked and acknowledged it doesn’t really need to cut a half-mile wide swath through the Brooker Creek Preserve to provide for the future electrical needs of Pinellas County, but the outrageous suggestion should put a white-hot spotlight on the alternative that literally hits us in the face every time we step out a door. Florida should be the national leader in using solar power as an alternative energy source. Our state makes a mockery of its own moniker, the Sunshine State, as long as this valuable resource is dismissed while discussion of alternatives to oil focuses on ethanol, “clean-burning” coal and nuclear energy.
Florida’s Public Service Commission (PSC) took an important step the first week of March when it voted to allow “net metering” statewide. Unbelievably, Florida was among a handful of states that previously did not have such a rule, according to the Florida Solar Energy Industries Association and Vote Solar, two advocates of solar energy in Florida. Net metering is a requirement that utility systems allow consumers with their own power generating equipment, such as rooftop solar panels, to both connect to the utility’s grid and to accept excess power back into the grid from such equipment. The importance of the rule is that it means the owner of a rooftop system actually can generate income as well as power by selling electricity back to the utility. The meter literally runs backwards. The consumer is billed only for the “net” electricity consumed — or may even receive a credit.
A second key part of the PSC action was to approve standard interconnection rules. Utility companies have argued for years that the electrical grid could be endangered by interconnecting with private electrical generating sources, whether they were solar panels, biofuel generators or any other backyard inventor’s contraption. Interconnection standards make that argument moot and expose it for the dodge it always was.
Sunshine is Florida’s most abundant energy resource. With this PSC action, the state is ready to establish a goal advocated as the Florida Solar Roofs Initiative, to obtain a modest 2% of its electricity from solar systems by 2020. The initiative would set a minimum requirement that would force big utility companies to accommodate small photovoltaic systems. It would help the solar industry become self-sufficient and diversify the state’s energy mix, while also helping to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The public does not need to be convinced. Vote Solar quotes a recent Mason-Dixon poll showing 90% of Floridians think the Legislature should encourage investment in solar.
When Floridians are facing the very real possibility that electric bills will soar with new and added charges subsidizing the construction of additional nuclear and other conventional fuel power plants, the Legislature should be exploring all possible incentives to put solar panels on all new construction and provide reasonable assistance for homeowners who want to retrofit existing homes. The consumer is going to bear the cost either way, but a million solar rooftop systems will provide vastly more benefits to those same consumers than new nuclear plants that require miles of clear-cut corridors for their power lines and massive indirect public subsidies.
,, Solar isn’t just a feel-good alternative. It is the most sensible and ultimately economical alternative.
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