Alex Sink paid a visit to local solar products distributor, Sun Electronics, this last week to announce her energy strategy for Florida. Not surprisingly based on the backdrop of a warehouse full of solar panels, her plan calls for a serious push into renewables and to open the grid to homes and commercial establishments.
For too long, mega-utilities have dominated the "market" for solar, wind, etc by making it difficult to connect to the grid, insisting on outrageous insurance riders, and sucking the oxygen out of renewables by latching their massively subsidized nuclear ambitions onto the tiny little toe-hold that solar, wind, biomass, and efficiency have in the energy mix.
The gubernatorial hopeful sees the struggling solar industry as a gateway to new Florida jobs and a clean/green tech hope for a diversified economy too heavily dependent on tourism, agriculture, and other lower wage jobs.
I've read a number of comments attached to the story in the Miami Herald and the Tampa Tribune (same story by Mary Ellen Klass ran in both papers) that attack solar as being "too expensive" and the usual nonesense about it "only working when the sun is out" by the usual know-nothings. What CFO Sink calls for is a smart suite of policies that will encourage the growth of an industry that is absolutely exploding throughout the rest of the world. Even within the US, Florida is competing with California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Tennessee, and about a half-dozen other states that are all vying to be the economic center of the new green energy economy. South Florida cities and counties are already jockeying to compete for these naescent industries, but the State has been the biggest impediment. With better policies - like adopting legislation enacting the solar property tax protection amendment to the state constitution, an agressive RPS that the formerly Republican Governor and the State PSC called for, fully funding the rebate program through a tiny public benefit trust fund, and tax credits for expansion and relocation for solar and wind manufacturing firms - we'd have a chance to compete.
Read more
Story in the Miami Herald
Blog post on Naked Politics
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