Submitted by Katie Kiselewski
FPL’s quest for efficiency and diversity in its power generation fleet has been a key enabler allowing the company to provide the nation’s best combination of reliability, resiliency and low bills. Today, FPL delivers reliability that is 59% better and bills that are nearly 40% lower than the national average. This is not by accident, but rather due to a decades-long pursuit to modernize and diversify the FPL power generation fleet.
“At FPL, we are working for our customers every single day, leveraging the latest technology to generate electricity more efficiently and save them money,” said Armando Pimentel, president and CEO of Florida Power & Light Company. “Continuing to diversify our power generation helps us deliver reliable electricity to customers and also protects them from fuel price volatility to keep their bills as low as possible.”
Fuel-efficient natural gas
The cost of fuel to generate electricity is a direct pass-through to customers. The more a utility can reduce fuel costs, the more it can help reduce bill impacts for customers. By modernizing its power plant fleet, including knocking down old, inefficient power plants and building new, highly efficient combined cycle natural gas plants, increasing nuclear generation at existing plants and investing in low-cost solar and battery storage energy generation, FPL has saved customers more than $16 billion in fuel costs since 2001. This includes $1.1 billion in fuel savings from low-cost solar energy centers.
Clean nuclear energy
FPL’s Turkey Point and St. Lucie nuclear power plants have been providing customers with clean, safe, reliable and affordable energy for decades. Combined, the plants generate nearly 3,500 megawatts of energy, which is the equivalent of powering more than 2 million homes and businesses.
Solar energy centers
FPL’s solar energy centers provide enough low-cost, clean energy to power over 1.5 million homes across the state annually, saving customers $1.1 billion in fuel costs. Each solar site delivers hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax property payments to the counties where they operate.
Investing in battery storage
Battery storage is another key piece of FPL’s diverse energy mix and is playing a crucial role in the company’s efforts to enhance grid resiliency. These systems extend the capabilities of solar energy centers and allow FPL to store and deliver energy when customers need it most. FPL has been operating battery storage technology for years and operates one of the world’s largest solar-powered batteries, the FPL Manatee Energy Storage Center – a 409-megawatt/900-megawatt-hour system that has enough capacity to power approximately 329,000 homes.
