Guest AuthorFloridians for Solar Choice is a legitimate grassroots citizens’ effort to give Florida residents and business owners the ability to choose solar energy and harness the power of the sun through the free market.
Unfortunately, despite being the Sunshine State that choice is currently limited in Florida. Our coalition is working to place a constitutional amendment on the 2016 ballot that would provide meaningful options for Florida’s families to power their homes and businesses with solar, living up to our Sunshine State nickname.
Floridians for Solar Choice has more than 50 coalition partners that encompass the political spectrum, from the right and the left, including associations representing Florida’s solar installers, retailers, hotels and restaurants – which employ hundreds of thousands of Floridians statewide. This initiative is a movement by Florida’s residents and businesses are fed up with the government-created monopoly utilities that are preventing the growth of solar in this state.
A new organization recently has sprung up. It aggressively parrots utility monopoly company arguments against the Floridians for Solar Choice ballot initiative with an amendment of its own, ironically called Consumers for Smart Solar. There’s nothing smart about this – it’s actually a sham, written by the monopoly utility itself.
This past week, Florida Power & Light acknowledged it participated in writing the amendment, making obvious the motive of the initiative itself: to maintain FPL’s monopolistic control over energy while calling it “consumer protection.”
Our amendment, under the banner of Florida Solar Choice, has zero mandates, zero subsidies, and will open up energy markets to allow more consumer choice. Consumer choice is at the heart of the American free market. Don’t be fooled by arguments stating that giving you, the consumer, more choices means less protection or higher rates. To say that it puts residents at risk is a desperate attempt to scare people. The facts speak for themselves, and these scary scenarios of consumer abuse have not materialized in other states that have energy competition.
Florida is one of only four states that, by law, expressly prohibits the sale of energy by any source outside of the utility monopoly. What does that mean for Floridians? The Sunshine State has very few rooftop solar systems relative to states that allow competition and free market principles. In fact, the lack of competition was a major driver in launching the Floridians for Solar Choice petition. Less than one-tenth of 1 percent of Florida’s electrical energy currently comes from solar.
As the price of solar power continues to drop, Floridians should have the option to buy energy from solar providers directly for their homes and businesses. If solar power from somebody other than your monopoly utility company could offer you power with long-term savings, why wouldn’t you want to at least be offered that option? If your landlord wishes to provide solar power directly to you, and it saves you money on your bill, why be denied that choice?
This new, misleading, sham solar petition ensures the current status-quo of the government-created utility monopolies by not providing any new options at all and simply preserving what already exists. After all, less rooftop solar is better for big power companies, and it is clear that they do not want any competition.
The sham solar effort even has a slick video trying to demonize solar companies as “Big Solar,” while the truth is that Florida’s solar industry is made up of many hardworking small-business owners trying to make a living. Forget “Big Solar,” we have now learned that it’s really “Big Monopoly ” behind this effort to mislead voters.
The Floridians for Solar Choice ballot initiative, which has more than 100,000 signatures, is currently before the Florida Supreme Court for approval, and we are confident that it will rule in our favor.
We urge all Floridians to go to our webpage at www.flsolarchoice.org to see for yourselves that our amendment truly means to open Florida’s energy market so we can live up the name: The Sunshine State.
Tory Perfetti is chairman of Floridians for Solar Choice Inc. and the Florida director of Conservatives for Energy Freedom. Mike Antheil is the executive director of the Florida Solar Energy Industries Association. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
One comment
Corey Watson
July 21, 2015 at 11:11 am
Support the real grassroots amendment by Floridians for Solar Choice, not the sham one from consumers for smart solar, which is a utility front group.
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