Floating Solar Comes To DeSantistan

BANANA — Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone — means finding places to install grid-scale solar is an uphill battery, especially in Florida, where the so-called governor has made a career of being a bigger jackass than Donald Trump. So it is somewhat surprising to read in Solar Power World this week that D3 Energy, a company that specializes in floating solar, has signed a master lease with the Florida Department of Transportation to serve as the exclusive developer of floating solar systems on FDOT-owned stormwater ponds. Its first project under the agreement — a floating solar array on an FDOT pond in Orlando — was fully commissioned earlier this year.

“In Florida, the bottleneck on new solar is rarely capital or technology — it’s available land. This lease solves that at the state level,” said Stetson Tchividjian, managing director of D3 Energy. “It took years of work with FDOT to get here. With our first project now in the water and operating, we’re ready to roll this out to partners across the state.”

Unlike most solar projects that take a site-by-site approach, the FDOT master lease consolidates statewide site access under a single agreement. It replaces piecemeal procurement with one master framework for FDOT coordination, which eliminates the fragmentation that has slowed clean energy deployment previously in the state.

D3 Energy estimates the FDOT pond inventory can support more than 1 GW of floating solar PV capacity statewide — enough to power over 200,000 Florida homes — while saving roughly 5,000 acres of Florida land from being converted to ground mount solar. The arrangement also generates recurring lease revenue for the State of Florida, turning passive infrastructure into a new revenue stream at no cost to taxpayers.

For Florida’s investor-owned and municipal utilities, the lease puts new generation where the demand already is — on ponds alongside the substations, highways, and the customer property it will serve. The result is faster deployment, lower interconnection costs, and clean energy that complements rather than competes with Florida land uses regulations, D3 Energy says.

This is welcome news, although some Floridians will complain about any renewable energy systems being built anywhere in the Free State of Florida. The governor was in a tizzy to use taxpayer funds to build his so-called Alligator Alcatraz in the Everglades, which cost the state $1.2 million a day to operate. One can only imagine the benefit to Florida residents that would have occurred if the same money was put toward making solar energy available to Florida residents.

But Snarling Ron, who learned firsthand how to impose maximum humiliation and degradation on his fellow human beings while stationed at Guantanamo Bay,  thought it was all worthwhile, because it allowed him to show he was tougher on immigrants than even the federal government.

Fortunately, he is term limited. There is no chance the next governor will be worse than Ron, who has run Florida as his own private fiefdom for the past 8 years. How FDOT made the decision to cut a deal with D3 Energy at a time when public officials are prohibited from uttering the words “climate change” and the federal government has declared war on all renewable energy projects is a mystery, but if it results in more solar energy being added to the grid in Florida, that will be a welcome development.