Orlando’s energy future: millions of solar panels, 75-ton batteries — and anxious residents

Orlando's electricity provider and its customers could use relationship therapy as they venture together into an era of sunshine powering homes, cars and most everything else.

What the municipally owned Orlando Utilities Commission aims to do is swift, consequential and risk-taking in a region of the nation only now going full throttle to green energy. Within 16 years, OUC plans to jettison more than 90 percent of its tried-and-true ability to make electricity with generation plants that burn fossil fuels, mainly coal and natural gas, and will have erected solar panels on more than 10,000 acres, an expanse larger than Winter Park.

In that time, the utility's batteries for providing nighttime power will grow in capacity to as much as that in 35,000 electric cars.

It's difficult to overstate the enormity of the transformation, which is intended to help shrink fossil fuel carbon pollution that drives global warming, rising sea levels, desertification, supercharged wildfires and storms, spreading pathogens, species extinctions and more.

Already, however, Orlando's utility is struggling to enlist its customers in moves it insists are necessary to chart this new course.

OUC wants to adjust rates so that using electricity during high-demand times of the day is more costly than during low-demand periods, a change it says will promote more efficient use of power. Critics say that many renters and low-income homeowners — in part because they can't afford modern, programmable appliances — have little or no ability to change when they consume electricity.

But an even more boisterous outcry has arisen over an issue that affects just a fraction of customers: A proposal to pay rooftop solar users less than current rates for the surplus electricity they send into OUC's power lines. Opposition led by influential city council member — and rooftop solar maven — Patty Sheehan has stalled the utility from moving forward with any modernizing rate changes, and has revealed a distrustful relationship at a time when the utility is about to take momentous steps toward a very different energy future.

"Right now, clearly, customers don't agree with OUC," said veteran state Rep. Anna Eskamani of Orlando, who is active with solar and climate issues in the legislature and more recently with her city.

Eskamani strongly supports OUC's larger commitment to ending its carbon pollution. But she said the utility, as it is publicly owned, needs to slow down and regain the confidence of its climate-concerned customers. "It's really important that you have the support of those you serve," she said.

OUC's chief executive officer, Clint Bullock, said in a recent meeting that the utility will "take the appropriate amount of time to reach out to stakeholders, listen to what they're saying, understand some of the studies and information that they're sharing with us and work through some of the misunderstandings and misconceptions."

While struggling with how it will charge customers in the future, the century-old OUC is moving forward with less controversy toward a monumental goal: reinventing how it makes and supplies power.

Most electric utilities traditionally prioritize one practice: burning carbon-based fuels to run electricity generators. Their prime objective decade after decade has been to tweak incremental gains in fuel efficiency.

What OUC is about to do – far outpacing any other municipal power provider in Florida – is pioneer a frontier devoid of carbon-based fuels.

"There's no doubt that the disruption to the utility industry as we transition to a carbon-free, clean energy future is unlike anything that they've seen," said Chris Castro, senior advisor at the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of State and Community Energy Programs and previously the sustainability officer for the city of Orlando.

Later this year, OUC will start up a pair of large solar plants – Harmony II and Storey Bend in Osceola County – able to provide for about 28,000 homes or roughly 10 percent of residential customers. For the first time, the sun will be a major source of the utility's electricity. That will take some getting used to for system operators because of solar's intermittency as conditions shift from clear skies to clouds to nighttime.

Next year, OUC will mothball one of its two, flagship generators that tower in the east Orange County skyline. They consume mountains of coal and generate tons of planet-heating pollution, although they remain in solid enough financial and mechanical shape as middle-aged plants to potentially run for many more decades.

OUC's plan for the other coal plant is to convert it to run on natural gas by 2027.

After that, the journey to a new era of energy begins to take on increasing uncertainty. Unknowns are: where to build solar plants, what revolutionary innovations or inventions may occur – including with hydrogen, nuclear, wind, and batteries – and what it all means for OUC's rates, its ability to keep the lights on and its continuation of approximately $100 million in annual cash contributions to city hall's operating expenses.

"The utility industry is being asked to transform extremely rapidly, far faster than anything we've done in our past with technologies that aren't as robust as we would like them to be," said Justin Kramer, OUC's director of emerging technology.

"I have to balance that with people who struggle to afford power, and I have to balance equity, and clean and reliable energy, with technologies that haven't been around for more than five or 10 years. That keeps me up at night," Kramer said.

If it goes well, OUC intends by 2050 to have zeroed out its net contribution to carbon pollution causing climate change.

Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer, who has a permanent OUC board seat and is an original and leading proponent of reining in the city's carbon pollution, warns that the path could be bumpy.

"It's not a slam dunk," Dyer said. "It's going to take a lot of wisdom and planning and being adaptable to the changing technology."

Stephen Smith, executive director of the environmental group Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, urges utilities to lean aggressively toward transformations that are bold and rapid. His group, emphasizing analysis, holds credibility with OUC.

"There is nothing more serious in the world than what we're dealing with: climate disruption and destabilizing the atmosphere," Smith said. "The science is overwhelming that the manifestation of the effects is much more pronounced than a lot of scientists even thought it would be at this point, and it's intensifying."

He said the controversy over OUC's proposal to reduce how much it pays for surplus electricity from rooftop solar panels is not uncommon among utilities and is distracting.

"Rooftop solar is a piece of the puzzle but it's a smaller piece of the puzzle," Smith said. "The most important thing we need to be deploying faster than anything else is utility solar. You don't want to get into so much of a big fight over rooftop solar that you lose perspective on what we've got to do to deploy as much as possible."

Just how much electricity OUC will have to harness from the sun is daunting.

Of the utility's nearly 250,000 residential electric customers, about 10,000 have solar panels on their rooftops. Those panels plus those of commercial customers have a combined capacity to generate 104 megawatts, or nearly 5 percent of OUC's capacity – a squirt of energy into the city's torrent of power.

The overall demand for OUC electricity is nearly 1,600 megawatts, with the vast majority of that coming today from burning fossil fuel. About a dozen generators typically provide that power, with many more on standby.

To ensure there's enough electricity at any given time — and get it where it needs to be — OUC operates what it calls an energy management center, a spacious bunker in east Orlando equipped with secure, isolated computers that direct millions of watts flowing across nearly 3,000 miles of the utility's transmission and distribution power lines.

The center's arrays of video screens lend to a sense of an intensive care unit, where the patient is breathing not oxygen but electricity. One of the simpler screen graphics depicts the minute-by-minute demand for OUC electricity.

Consumption dips to a low at about 4 a.m., just before the early birds' showers and coffee makers start and the graphic's line begins to steadily increase.

At sunrise, street lights flicker out and the line dips briefly. The need for power then rises until about 4 p.m., though the timing of the daily peak can be dramatically altered by thunderstorms and their cooling effects.

Every day has an operational plan, written beginning a week earlier and accounting for which generators will cost the least to operate and what to do if one of them fails catastrophically.

The overall impression is of deep institutional experience and nothing left unaccounted for – except for the solar energy on the scale that's coming.

The rise of solar energy will bring challenges never seen before, including how to respond to thunderstorm shadows galloping across millions of solar panels and causing their power outputs to plunge, and whether batteries will compensate sufficiently. That will call for new ways of daily planning.

Engineers study solar exhaustively and look to the experiences of others. OUC has set up two dozen weather stations to watch for and project the shading over solar panels from storms.

But no two utilities are alike, they note, and the sun doesn't shine as relentlessly in the Sunshine State as it does in the Southwest and West.

"Hopefully, there is not going to be a big learning curve," said Keith Mutters, system planning and reliability director.

Nearly three years ago, OUC bought what amounts to insurance in case of a problematic implementation of solar energy.

That would be the Osceola Generating Station, a "peaker" power plant nestled in remote pinelands of Osceola County. "Not many people even know we are out here," said Milliard Long, who is in charge of OUC's generators fueled with natural gas.

About 20 years old and last operated by a private company seeking profit in the electricity market, the station cost $100 million to buy and upgrade.

Groups such as the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy and Sierra think the investment should have gone to solar. OUC regards the 510 megawatt plant — which is more output than from either coal plant — as an ace up its sleeve.

"As we move forward with our clean energy transition, ensuring operational flexibility is essential," said Bullock, OUC's leader, at the time of the acquisition.

OUC's mainline generators are efficient but ponderous, taking much of a day to start up and put into service.

The Osceola Generating Station, by contrast, fires up "with the click of a mouse" to make electricity in 15 minutes and reach full output in 29 minutes and can power off just as quickly.

Doing the work are three jet engines strapped to generators, devouring natural gas, with a three-day supply of backup diesel fuel on site.

In the worst case of extended cloudy weather coupled with a broken natural gas pipeline, the station will keep Orlando's lights on.

But the station is a hot rod and not an econo-machine – just one of the jet-engine generators will suck down 215 gallons of diesel fuel every minute – and running it can be pricey.

Solar energy, meanwhile, is a rising bargain, with no charge for the sun's rays, which is another justification for projects ahead.

By 2032, according to OUC reporting to the state's Public Service Commission, OUC "anticipates" constructing a dozen large solar plants, each covering between 500 and 800 acres, containing approximately 300,000 panels. The cost of the plants, about $75 million each today, is expected to continue to decline.

The batteries needed to store some of this solar power during the day — then provide it when the sun doesn't shine — come in 4 megawatt units the size of a shipping container and weighing 75 tons. Batteries are likely to be dispersed widely, plugged in next to solar plants, substations and perhaps big commercial customers.

The Southern Alliance For Clean Energy measures utility solar performance by the number of solar watts per customer.

By that metric, Orlando Utilities Commission now ranks first in the Southeast for projected solar growth from 2023 to 2027, besting the giant, stockholder-owned Florida Power and Light Co. and Duke Energy.

"It's great that we are building more solar, but the real truth is we are not building anywhere near enough," said Jim Fenton, director of the Florida Solar Energy Center at the University of Central Florida. "That includes rooftop solar."

But on that matter, OUC, customers and the city remain mired in animus, and it is still to be determined whether that is reconcilable.

"Honestly, I do not trust OUC," city council member Sheehan said. "They look at us as competition."

OUC had planned by now to adopt its rooftop solar, time-of-day and other rate changes – calling them essential to a new way of providing electricity — until headed off by rare dissension on its board coming from the city's leading green-energy booster.

"If we were voting today," Dyer said at a board meeting this summer, "I would vote no on that."