Florida Power & Light Company has officially notified the Florida Public Service Commission (PSC) regarding its plans of filing a formal request to set new rates once its current base rate agreement concludes at the end of 2025.
According to certain reports, the stated plan, which is likely to span from 2026 to 2029, will make it possible for the company to continue to diversify its electricity generation mix, protect customers from fuel price volatility, and continue to deliver some of the country’s most reliable electricity to its 6 million customers, all while keeping bills as low as possible.
More on the same would reveal how it plans to facilitate bill adjustments moving forward. In essence, FPL expects that its proposal, along with projections for fuel and other costs, would increase a typical residential customer bill by an average annual rate of approximately 2.5% from January 2025 through 2029. Having said so, even with the proposed rate adjustment, FPL bills would remain well below the national average and below many other Florida electric utilities. Customers will be able to calculate potential adjustments to their bill after FPL files its formal plan.
Markedly enough, FPL will submit a detailed four-year rate plan as early as February to the PSC, beginning an extensive public review process that includes numerous opportunities for input from customers prior to a decision by state regulators.
“FPL has a proven track record of delivering value for our customers – including diverse energy sources, high reliability and low bills. While we know there is never a good time to request a rate increase, we need to continue to make smart investments in the grid and in new generation resources so we can continue to deliver reliable electricity, enhance resiliency and diversify our generation mix to power our fast-growing state,” said Armando Pimentel, CEO and President at FPL.
Taking a deeper view of the plan in question, we begin from its promise to deliver reliable service. This it will be able to deliver by making continued investments in the critical infrastructure and technologies that helped FPL’s distribution service become 59% more reliable than the national average and the best among major utilities in Florida. So far, the company has empowered customers with smart-grid devices to help them achieve speed restoration and avoid 1.8 million customer outages in 2023 alone. This smart-grid technology has also helped people avoid 1.4 million outages during storms during the last three hurricane seasons.
Next up, we must expand upon how the FPL plan will diversify the way it generates electricity. Here, the company will scale up investments in low-cost solar and battery storage technology to complement its existing power plant fleet, which includes one of the nation’s largest natural gas fleets and safe, reliable nuclear power.
Then, there is the pledge to keep bills as low as possible. Now, we referred to how the company banks upon latest technology to realize that, but what we haven’t mentioned yet is that modernization of FPL’s power plant fleet has saved customers billions of dollars in fuel costs, whereas on the other hand, investing in solar has saved customers more than $890 million in fuel which FPL did not have to purchase. On top of that, FPL’s non-fuel operations and maintenance costs per customer are nearly 26% lower than they were a decade ago. They are also the lowest among peer utilities and save customers about $2.9 billion per year compared to an average-performing utility, or more than $24 per month on a typical 1,000-kWh residential customer bill.
Among other things, we ought to mention that FPL has opened about 275,000 customer new accounts since 2021, but in case that wasn’t enough, it expects to open 330,000 more through the end of 2029, which will require significant new generating capacity and distribution infrastructure to meet demand in one of America’s fastest-growing states. We must also mention that, despite the rate increase, no other utility in the U.S. currently provides a better combination of reliability, resiliency and low bills than FPL.
