The solar power companies of Florida said it. The Tampa Bay Timessaid it. The Miami Heraldsaid it. The Orlando Sentinelsaid it. The League of Women Voters said it. The Green Party of Florida, the Libertarian Party of Florida, the Christian Coalition, the AFL-CIO, the Democratic Environmental Caucus of Florida, the Capital Young Republicans all said it. Al Gore said it. And now, an insider has said it, too, sort of.
What they said is that constitutional Amendment 1—with the tricksy name of “Rights of Electricity Consumers Regarding Solar Energy Choice”—on the Florida ballot November 8 is a scam by the state’s electric utility companies, a misleading proposal masquerading as pro-solar. The utilities hope to get voters to support their effort to do what their utility counterparts did in Nevada: Undermine rooftop solar and “net metering” to maintain their monopoly and profits.
The insider is Sal Nuzzo, a vice president at the James Madison Institute, which was hired by the state’s largest utilities. On a panel at the State Energy/Environment Leadership Summit in Nashville October 2, he described how the utility industry initiated and financed the amendment. He called it “an incredibly savvy maneuver” that “would completely negate anything they [pro-solar interests] would try to do either legislatively or constitutionally down the road.”
Knowing how pro-solar Florida voters are—they proved it again in August when they voted overwhelmingly in favor of property tax breaks for people who install solar panels on their homes—Nuzzo said the utilities needed a means of leveraging that support in their favor. Which is how the amendment was born. It originally was meant to confuse matters by undercutting another amendment that actually would have favored solar consumers, but which didn’t get enough signatures to make the ballot.
Nuzzo said in an interview after his talk gained some publicity that there was nothing deceptive about the decision to initiate Amendment One. Critics beg to differ.