Martin County Solar Energy News

Companies are beginning to move to the Treasure Coast in anticipation of the next building boom.

With a political climate ripe for renewable energy, land available at bargain prices, easy access to both I-95 and the Turnpike plus Florida Power & Light’s first major Florida solar installation in Indiantown, solar companies are eyeing the Treasure Coast.

With parent FPL Group as the country’s top producer of solar electricity, FPL is on the forefront of the solar movement.

With the Indiantown thermal plant and a photovoltaic array in Cape Canaveral scheduled to come online in 2010, followed by a photovoltaic array in DeSoto County, FPL project will make Florida the No. 2 producer of solar energy in the nation, said spokesperson Jackie Anderson.

“Our goal is to make South Florida a magnet for renewable energy manufacturers, research dollars at our state’s universities and good-paying jobs that can’t be outsourced,” she said.

“Solar solves most of the problems we have with other production methods like coal,” said St. Lucie County Commissioner Charles Grande. “I’m not anti-nuke. I lived near the FPL Nuclear Power Plant on Hutchinson Island. I would say they are very good stewards of that plant.”

Grande sees a future in solar. He has been working to help solar companies and the public see that future close to home.

“We have a lot of open space — groves lost to citrus greening or canker that will probably be used for housing unless we can find another application,” he said.

“Housing costs more in services than we get back in taxes,” Grande said. “In a down economy, commercial, industrial or agricultural uses are all positive contributors to the county.”

Grande said his vision is not just utility-scale solar. He hopes for a healthy mix of solar installations on rooftops and on land.

“Rooftops — that’s free real estate,” said Sherri Shields, spokesperson for University of Central Florida’s Florida Solar Energy Center in Cocoa. “And real estate is expensive even in this economy.”

“But we think it’s a great thing that utilities are investing in solar,” she added.

Unless people monitor the solar debates in Tallahassee and Washington, D.C., carefully, however, almost all of the solar on the Treasure Coast could end up being utility-scale, said Justin Hoysradt, vice president of sales for Jupiter-based solar company Abundant Energy.

Solar incentive legislation in New Jersey ended up promoting large national and multi-national solar companies at the expense of local companies such as Abundant, he said. These utility-scale developers were able to put themselves first in line for the solar contracts and incentives, leaving nothing for the local contractors.

The renewable energy bill discussed this year by the Florida Legislature would have created the same problems, Hoysradt said. Luckily, the legislators packed up and went home without passing a bill.

Hoysradt thinks the U.S. Legislature may take up the solar issue. He said he hopes they will create set-asides for distributed power generation, in which solar arrays on the roofs of homes and businesses feed into the electric grid.

Grande said he hopes to get FPL thinking in terms of distributed power generation. “FPL is working with the School Board of Martin County to generate electricity,” he said.

In a simple landlord/tenant arrangement, FPL will rent the roof on J.D. Parker Elementary, where they will install solar panels to generate electricity. FPL is still the generator and the school is still an electric customer, Grande said.

“I’ve been talking with them about possible projects we could do here in St. Lucie County,” Grande said. “We have a civic center, the county building, the Clerk of Courts, we have a lot of roofs.”

For a fully informed discussion, the conversation has to jump past utility-scale solar production to utility-scale system demands, said R.B. Sloan, director of electric utilities in Vero Beach.

“Vero Beach is a winter-peaking system. Seven, eight, nine in the morning is when we need it most,” he said. “So far, wind and solar can’t meet that demand.”

“There’s a great misconception that green resources can replace power plants. If they (green resources) aren’t available when we need electricity, we can’t recognize their full value,” he said.

Sloan said, at some point, he expects a portion of their generating capacity to be served by solar, whether produced on rooftops of customers’ homes and businesses or purchased from a utility-scale project.

“A lot will be driven by what our customers want,” he said. “Currently, solar is a relatively expensive source of electricity.”

Nonetheless, solar could soon be a driving force for the economy on the Treasure Coast. And Grande is positioning St. Lucie County to benefit, helping several solar component manufacturers who want to set up facilities here.

Grande envisions a future in which the Education and Research Park in north county anchors a new “green” industry core housing research and development with a circle of component manufacturers, generating facilities, rooftop distributed generation and solar infrastructure radiating out through the county.

Solar companies are already moving here in anticipation of a solar development boom. But it will be up to everyone on the Treasure Coast to make certain the boom benefits the local economy and isn’t hijacked by major national solar companies with the inside track to a political system we don’t understand, said Hoysradt.