DeSantis veto a win for solar industry

Controversial bill would have given utilities ability to charge customers for lost revenue

TALLAHASSEE — Taking on another state corporate giant, Gov. Ron DeSantis vetoed a controversial net metering bill Wednesday that critics said would have favored utility giant Florida Power & Light at the expense of the fledgling rooftop solar industry.

Noting the bill would have authorized investor-owned utilities to charge customers for lost revenue caused by residential solar power generation in the midst of steep inflation nationally, DeSantis said in his veto letter that the state “should not contribute to the financial crunch that our citizens are facing.”

The changes to net metering would not have taken effect until Jan. 1, 2024, and be phased in over several years, however, so consumers would not have seen an immediate increase in their bills.

The Legislature sent the bill to his office while he was reportedly in Las Vegas attending a “Rise Up” rally in support of Adam Laxalt, a Trump-backed candidate looking to flip a Nevada U.S. Senate seat from Democratic to Republican. The governor later revealed his veto in an emailed press release.

Fleming Island Republican Jennifer Bradley, the bill’s Senate sponsor, said it provided a glide path to phasing out “subsidies” that utilities pay to rooftop solar owners.

But Sen. Jeff Brandes, R-Pinellas Park, called it a “sledgehammer” approach that would destroy the rooftop solar industry and eliminate thousands of Florida jobs.

The governor’s veto is seen as a victory for environmentalists, and the growing residential solar industry, but a huge setback

to FPL and its parent company NextEra, which have donated a combined $3.3 million to legislative candidates and political committees during the current election cycle.

The Miami Herald reported that a draft of the net metering bill was written by FPL, which served as the basis for the bills filed by Bradley in the Senate and Lawrence McClure of Tampa in the House.

FPL and the bill’s supporters said its middle-income customers are subsidizing rich homeowners who can afford solar panels, which can run as high as $100,000 or more. Solar energy proponents said reducing the credits to solar customers for the energy they send back to the grid will make it harder for middle-income and lower-income homeowners to afford to install panels.

Created in 2008, Florida’s net metering program allows utility customers who install alternative energy sources like solar panels on their homes or businesses to sell excess electricity generated by those devices back to the utilities.

It was seen as an incentive to getting people to invest in solar and other renewable energy sources at a time when only 200 utility customers had solar panels on their roofs. Today, more than 90,000 Floridians have solar panels on their homes.

About a half of one percent of FPL’s 5.6 million customers have rooftop solar panels. The other 99.5% pay an additional $30 million a year to subsidize those panels, or less than $6 a year per customer.

The bill would have allowed the Public Utilities Commission, which regulates investor-owned utilities, to allow utilities to start reducing the amount of energy credits solar customers receive for excess energy they return to the grid.

The utilities also would have been allowed to impose any combination of fixed charges, electric grid access fees, and monthly minimum bills, to “ensure hat the public utility recovers the fixed costs of serving customers that own or lease renewable generation”

The bill would have slowly phased in the proposed changes through 2028 and grandfather customers who own solar panels by the end of 2022 under the current rules for 20 years.

The governor’s veto comes less than a week after he signed legislation dissolving Disney’s Reedy Creek Special Improvement District and revoking a special carveout for Disney in a 2021 law allowing residents to sue social media companies for deplatforming them.

The Disney corporation has also donated millions to lawmakers and their political committees over the years.

Critics said those measures were intended to punish Disney for opposing the state’s new “Don’t Say Gay” law that prohibits classroom instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity in grades K-3 and that such instruction must be age and developmentally appropriate for other grades.

DeSantis was outraged that Disney’s CEO said the

law never should have been approved and would work

to repeal it. He said he didn’t want “woke” corporations telling Florida how to govern itself.