Florida Power & Light: More questions than answers by geniusofdespair

How suspicious are you when you get a letter that starts out “As Americans...” from your energy company? It makes my blood run cold. What do they want? In this case it is more money for you to enroll in a SUNSHINE ENERGY PROGRAM, to purchase renewable electricity from wind, bioenergy and the sun. Sounds good right? They say: Residential customers served by FPL will have the option to choose power derived from renewable energy for a nominal, monthly charge of $9.75 per month. It will be a fixed cost for the environmental benefits associated with 1,000 kwh of cleaner electricity. (I use about that much per month in my home.)

In 2004 FP&L had 6,000 residents in the program at $9.75 additional each month. That amounts to almost a million dollars a year collected. Now remember this is the same company that is trying to build a Coal Fired Plant in the Everglades just west of Lake Okeechobee (the lake that feeds into the Everglades) at this very moment.


What does the additional $9.75 pay for?
According to FPL, the charge goes toward the purchase of renewable resources for the program and nominal administrative costs to operate the program.

The $9.75, we are now told by Rhonda Roff, President of Save It Now, Glades! Inc., will go toward building a solar power research array in Sarasota, FL. It is not built yet. Furthur Roff states, “If FPL is asking their ratepayers to vote with their checkbooks, they will certainly get a distorted view. There are many who care, and want to do the right thing, but either cannot afford an additional ten bucks per month or simply do not see that a company with a net profit of over $600 million in 2006 (who, by the way, is a huge emitter of greenhouse gases and toxic air pollutants) needs their charity.”

“FPL reps maintain that we don’t have enough sunny hours here in Florida to make photovoltaics useful. If you talk to the Florida Solar Energy Center in Cocoa, you get quite a different story. Who would you believe?” Said Roff.

FPL says the Sunshine Energy Program is avoiding over 10,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions each year. Where? “In Florida and other states nationwide” their Form letter says.

So let’s get this straight, we want to put a coal plant smack dab near the middle of the State, bordering on the water feeding the Everglades (the Everglades happens to have one of the highest levels of Methylmercury in the world already). Methylmercury is the BAD mercury, it is the type of mercury that is bio-available which means it moves up the food chain in aquatic critters in the water and to the birds and humans that eat the fish. Dan Kimball, Superintendent of Everglades National Park, said, in the Miami Herald, that his main concerns were haze and further mercury contamination that already has forced health warnings, in the Everglades and every Florida waterway, against eating many fish.

So FPL on the one hand has been running this FEEL GOOD program (that has done not much to nothing) costing homeowners an additional $117 a year since 2004. And, yet on the other hand, they still want to build a coal plant to drop mercury in our water to poison our fish and increase carbon dioxide that they have us paying EXTRA to reduce. I say: ICK.