To call Florida Power & Light’s $6.9 billion rate increase a “settlement,” as the utility and its regulators do, is like calling a bank robbery a “transaction.” The terminology is facially correct. It’s also woefully wrong.
More accurately, it’s a swindle, a scam and a sellout of the vast majority of FPL’s six million customers.
Their legal representative, Florida’s public counsel, was not invited to the table where the company and some of its largest corporate customers cut their sweetheart deal. He objected, but the egregiously misnamed Public Service Commission (PSC) approved it — unanimously.
Abandoning all judgment
It’s not a “settlement” when most affected parties oppose it. Four of the five commissioners sounded like they had misgivings but seemed to follow some unspoken command.
“It’s not the dream settlement, but it is the one before us,” said PSC member Art Graham, who’s leaving next month.
So? Nothing in the law or in common sense required them to check their judgment at the office door.
They have a capable professional staff to advise them. It went unheard, which is significant.
Public Counsel Walt Trierweiler called it “disproportionately favorable” to corporate customers. When he tried to file a counterproposal, PSC Chairman Mike LaRosa rejected it because FPL is an “indispensable party” to any settlement. By that logic, the millions of households who must pay the freight are entirely dispensable.
Why it works this way
Understanding this requires knowing how the system is built to work and why it is that utilities always seem to win.
The PSC is an arm of the Legislature, which is under the spell of lobbyists. The PSC members are appointed by the governor, but must be nominated by a 12-member council dominated by legislators. FPL and its corporate parent, NextEra Energy, are consistently among the largest contributors to political campaigns in Florida.
Fifteen years ago, when Charlie Crist was governor, the Senate refused to confirm four of his PSC appointees after they rejected a major FPL rate hike. The neutered PSC has minded its manners ever since.
Trierweiler will appeal the FPL sellout to the Supreme Court, but higher regular bills will arrive next month, averaging $14 more per month to start. The increase is greater than the scheduled elimination of an $11.02 hurricane recovery surcharge.
A faux ‘settlement’
One way the “settlement” favors corporations over the public is in the financing of new data centers to satisfy the voracious demands of artificial intelligence and other high-tech consumers.
As first proposed by FPL, tech companies would be required to pay for at least 90% of anticipated energy costs, even if they turned out to use less. That would spare mom-and-pop ratepayers from having to front the expense of building unused capacity for those corporate consumers.
The “settlement” lowers the guarantee to 70%, which raises the potential liability for customers. In hearings on the rate case, FPL maintained that attracting data centers would benefit everyone. That’s recycled voodoo economics.
Data centers are enormous and have huge environmental consequences, including massive water use to cool their computers. Rate increases that favored data centers contributed to the recent losses of two Republican incumbents on Georgia’s elected Public Service Commission.
This “settlement” should rise to the top of Florida’s 2026 election issues. Attorney General James Uthmeier should have opposed it, as he was asked. He didn’t.
There likely will be a new attempt to have the PSC elected again, as it was until 1978. That would be foolish in this age of unlimited campaign spending. Corporate money would simply control the PSC directly, rather than through legislative surrogates.
The PSC should be an agency under the governor and Cabinet, but that would likely require a constitutional amendment, along with a better sense of public duty by the governor and the Cabinet.
Skeletons in FPL’s closet
Of related interest is that a three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has revived a stockholder’s suit against NextEra Energy and FPL on certain belated disclosures in its SEC filings, including FPL’s financing of “ghost” candidates in legislative elections. The most significant of those led to the narrow defeat of then-state Sen. José Javier Rodríguez of Miami, an FPL opponent, now a Democratic candidate for attorney general.
The extensively detailed opinion by Judge Gerald Bard Tjoflat — a 95-year-old Florida resident — capably describes the complaint that U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, one of President Trump’s most controversial appointees, had dismissed.
“The complaint has it all: corporate malfeasance, bribery, off-the-books recordkeeping, surveilling journalists, creating ‘ghost’ candidates, corrupting independent media outlets, and a failed acquisition that spiraled into two federal indictments,” Tjoflat wrote.
It’s the same case of election interference that the Federal Elections Commission dismissed on another of its partisan 3-3 tie votes. The FEC is as useless as the PSC, but that’s an issue for another day.
Meanwhile, the lawsuit, whose plaintiffs include the retirement funds for Hollywood police officers and Pembroke Pines police and firefighters, goes back to Cannon for trial. Good luck with that.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.
