Daily e-Edition
Evening e-Edition
Sign up for email newsletters
Sign up for email newsletters
Daily e-Edition
Evening e-Edition
Trending:
When I drive north on I-75 through Marion or Sumter County I’m amazed: row after row of solar panels stretching to the horizon. They aren’t a novelty anymore. They’re the new normal.
Despite the chaos in Washington over climate policy, something remarkable is happening in the energy world, especially here in Florida. Market forces and plummeting technology costs are driving a clean energy transition that no single politician can stop, as hard as they try.
The United States is undergoing one of the largest energy transitions in our history. For the first time ever, we generated more electricity from solar than from coal in May, despite the Trump administration’s efforts to strangle renewable energy. In March, renewables surpassed methane gas, normally our single largest electricity source, for the first time.
Florida is part of this transition. We now rank third for solar power, behind only Texas and California. Last year, the Sunshine State produced 70 times more solar power than a decade ago, enough to power nearly 2.8 million homes.
Florida Power & Light has become an unexpected leader. The utility added an average of 1,585 megawatts of solar capacity per year over the last three years, equivalent to nearly three major coal plants annually. They plan to deploy 93,000 megawatts of solar and 50,000 megawatts of battery storage by 2045. When a major investor-owned utility bets its future on solar and storage, something has fundamentally shifted.
But what happens when the sun goes down? Batteries solve the one limitation critics have always cited. A record 9.7 gigawatt-hours of storage capacity was installed nationwide in just the first quarter of 2026. For Floridians, the appeal is practical as well as environmental: after a hurricane knocks out the grid, a home battery keeps the refrigerator running.
Here’s where the picture gets complicated. Powerful forces keep trying to roll back this progress.
Backed by investor-owned utilities, the Florida Legislature passed a bill in 2022 to gut net metering, the policy that makes home solar financially viable by crediting homeowners for excess electricity sent to the grid. A Mason-Dixon poll found that 84% of Florida voters support net metering. Gov. Ron DeSantis vetoed the bill, but the utilities will be back. The threat has not gone away.
At the federal level, the headwinds are stronger still. The residential solar tax credit was eliminated at the end of 2025. The Inflation Reduction Act, which helped drive the solar boom, has faced sustained political assault. The administration has been hostile to clean energy at nearly every turn.
Here’s the essential truth: solar and wind are now the cheapest sources of new electricity, and batteries are following the same cost curve. What remains are politics and the stubborn protection of fossil fuel profits.
Utilities are building solar because it’s cheaper, and the price of sunshine never changes: it’s always free. Homeowners are adding panels and batteries for resilience after hurricanes.
The transition is real. It’s visible from the highway. It’s here. But it needs citizens who demand that their leaders stop obstructing it and start accelerating it.
David Hastings is a retired climate scientist and chair of the Sierra Club Suwannee St. Johns group.
Copyright 2026 Orlando Sentinel. All rights reserved. The use of any content on this website for the purpose of training artificial intelligence systems, algorithms, machine learning models, text and data mining, or similar use is strictly prohibited without explicit written consent.
