We Just Helped More Than 100,000 Floridians Save Money on Their Energy Bills

In Florida, it’s been a fight to get energy efficiency goals set, but we reached a groundbreaking settlement August 8 with major utilities. The upshot? More than 100,000 low-income Floridians will get meaningful help in conserving energy over the next five years.

This is a welcome step in a lengthy battle, and the effort shows why it’s critical to have legal advocates like Earthjustice who can pursue justice for the long haul.

We started this work 10 years ago, representing the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE) in trying to fend off utility proposals to drastically cut energy efficiency goals in the state by 90%. We weren’t successful that year, but knowing that low-lying Florida is especially vulnerable to rising seas, violent storms and soaring temperatures, we persevered for our clients in advocating for more sensible energy efficiency goals.

Florida state law requires the state’s appointed utility regulators, the Public Service Commission, to review the state’s largest utilities’ energy efficiency goals every five years. In a state where politics has wiped the words “climate change” out of policy, we knew we had to be front and center every five years.

We came back to the Public Service Commission in 2019. Things got even grimmer. Led by Florida Power and Light, many of the utilities proposed cutting their energy efficiency goals even further — this time, down to zero or virtually zero. That’s right — no energy efficiency goals for Florida utilities — and little help for low-income customers — at all.

We intervened and opposed this, pointing out that abolishing low-income programs would cause harm to hundreds of thousands of Floridians. Our 2019 clients were the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy and the League of United Latin American Citizens. That year, the Public Service Commission rejected the utilities’ ridiculous zero energy efficiency goals, but the commissioners didn’t insist on anything much better — they decided to continue the meager goals from 2014.

This year — 2024 — we engaged on the issue again on behalf of the League of United Latin American Citizens, Florida Rising, and the Environmental Confederation of Southwest Florida.  This time, we successfully helped improve the state’s energy efficiency rule in some respects and fended off utility efforts to water-down the process even further.

Knowing we and our clients would show up at the Public Service Commission, this time the major utilities universally proposed increasing their energy efficiency goals and their programs to help low-income customers.

We pointed out that Florida has an affordability crisis, with the fourth-highest electricity bills in the nation in 2023. In the end, Florida Power and Light, JEA in Jacksonville, and the Orlando Utilities Commission agreed to increase their programs that help low-income customers by over 50 percent. Duke Energy and Tampa Electric Company also agreed to boost help for low-income customers. The measures include energy saving kits, weather stripping for doors, insulation, and energy efficient light bulbs.

It’s worth repeating our important overall result — more than 100,000 low-income Floridians should now be getting meaningful assistance on energy conservation and high bills over the next five years. While there is much more work to be done in Florida, we are (finally) heading in the right direction.