The public at war with Florida Power and Light: No Plan B ... by gimleteye

By now, the Public Service Commission must know it is being gamed by Florida Power and Light. The utility is in the news, and the PSC too, for its clash over release of data on employee compensation. The PSC says it needs to know, in order to determine if the rate increase sought by FPL is causing citizens to fund the costs of excessive compensation. FPL says, it is none of the public's business.

The public is at war with FPL on another front: the company's plans to site new high voltage transmission lines-- to service its nuclear ambitions at Turkey Point-- along heavily populated US Route 1. Up and down the region's transportation corridor, elected officials and citizens are angry. The utility's alternate route--through Everglades National Park--is also creating an uproar among environmentalists who also have their hands full trying to prevent billions of cubic yards of limestone from being mined by FPL in Biscayne Bay wetlands; an impact that not only affects habitat and restoration but also speeds saltwater intrusion toward farmland, irrigation and drinking water wells.

Today, at 1:00PM at the Coconut Grove Sailing Club in Miami, State Representative Carlos Lopez-Cantera (R-Miami) will hold a meeting between local, municipal officials and community leaders and officials from Florida Power & Light (FP&L) to discuss the proposed placement of transmission lines by FP&L along U.S.1. But it is hard to know what will be accomplished: in Florida, electric utilities hold all the cards.

The top card: money. Last year, the PSC approved a special adjustment that allowed ratepayers, whether they wanted to or not, to fund $100 million of requested costs associated with the planning and permitting of FPL's new nuclear reactors at Turkey Point. That money buys a lot of attention by skilled lawyers and lobbyists and public relations consultants. The public is ill-matched to compete.

The presumption underlying the electric utilities' business models is simple: that the public interest corresponds with producing more energy. This formula fit especially nicely in Florida. For a hundred years, the engine serving economic development had only one source of fuel: consumers moving into the state from outside its borders. The latest news is being painted as an exception: that for the first time since World War II, Florida's population has markedly decreased.

The utilities, the newspapers, and our politics are united in certainty that our current recession, if it can be called that, is a passing phenomenon. But there is plenty of information and data available to economists to dispute this notion. There is a massive oversupply of housing capacity in Florida. Foreclosures continue to rise in a ceaseless tide. It is not clear when or how an economy so hobbled by debt can absorb the imbalances.

After the fiscal stimulus-- costing trillions-- works its way through, there is no Plan B. Within the service lifetime of new nuclear power plants constructed at the shoreline, rising sea levels will impose massive hardships on rate payers. For this factor, too, electric utilities have no Plan B.

The bright fact is that it is time for our public and political reality to catch up with changing circumstances that are fundamentally different from any that have confronted this state and nation. Through the turmoil of the health care town hall meetings, challenges to "change we can believe in" are proving hardened against calm and common sense. This does not bode well for corporate America and the electric utilities, in particular, that would do well to re-think their rationales and to factor in the difficulties of doing so, when so many are paid so well to keep making the same mistakes, again and again, expecting a different result.