Florida Insurance Network

I’ll believe it only when I see it but for the moment 2010 stands a chance of being remembered as the dawn of Florida’s renewable-energy era.

I’m told that maybe as soon as next week we’ll see proposed legislation requiring Florida utilities to pay a premium to businesses and homeowners for green electricity generated by renewables, such as rooftop, solar photovoltaic units.

The fundamental concept is to shift the cost of subsidizing green energy from taxpayers to rate-payers.

Here’s how it works. Utilities sign contracts with individual property owners to purchase green electricity at above-market rates for a period of 15, 20 or maybe even 25 years.

Now, instead of sweating the initial investment and counting the time to payoff, property owners make money on stuff like solar pv by sending the extra juice they generate to utilities, which buy it for the price stated in their contracts.

This idea has a God-awful PR disaster of a name: “Feed-in tarrif.” It also goes by “renewable energy dividend,” which is a hell of a lot better.

Either way, the concept is new in this country but Germany has been doing it successfully for years. Spain, too. Last year, the City of Gainesville decided to become the first to try it in the United States. Gainesville, which owns its utility, agreed to purchase power for 32 cents per kilowatt hour (kwh). The going rate is 12.5 cents per kwh.

The city capped its purchase at 20 kwh and the program sold out in the blink of an eye. No surprise there, right? They’re practically giving away money, especially when you take into consideration the federal tax credit paid for these systems. Even banks like the idea because they can make loans to finance renewable systems and virtually guarantee full repayment with interest, thanks to utility contracts.

The downside is that someone has to pay the difference between 32 cents and 12.5 cents per kwh. Under this plan that would be ratepayers, not taxpayers. But before you go rummaging for your pitchforks and torches, know that in Gainesville the estimated average rate hike per customer was less than $1 per month.

Even a whole buck a month is spit in the ocean in the context of electric rates but we’re bound to hear how it’s so regressive and unfair to poor people. And I guess it is to some extent but I ask this: In the long run, which is really more regressive, a continuing parade of rate hikes for new nukes and such, or a plan that could ultimately revolutionize the way we generate electricity in this country from big, expensive and dirty centralized power plants to a multitude of dispersed, clean and cheap little generators?

I’ll take the latter, especially when you consider the economic spinoff in the form of new jobs and businesses created to meet demand for installation of solar pv and such. It’s no exaggeration to think of this in terms of a whole new industry. Lord knows we need it in this state.

Naysayers are going to blast this as just another trick of the tree huggers to avoid market forces, which dictate that green power can’t compete with conventional fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas. Somewhere along the line they’re bound to make the point that until the cost of renewables equals that of conventionals, we shouldn’t pay up.

And to these folks I say we’re already paying up for conventionals and have been for years. Consider the cost of war to protect access to foreign oil, huge costs associated with climate change (you can be damn sure insurance companies believe it’s real), and the sheer environmental cost of techniques such as mountaintop removal coal mining. Talk about disproportionate impact on poor people. Oh yeah. We’re paying up, alright. The costs don’t show up on a monthly bill where we can bitch and moan about them but we’re paying up in a big way.

In the long run, we’re going to pay a lot less by subsidizing home-grown power to a point where market forces kick in to make it even cheaper than our beloved conventionals.

I don’t have much detail about the bill that’s expected to be announced for consideration by the Florida Legislature, except that it could be capped at 90 megawatt hours in the first year. That’s a good start. Bring it on. Just don’t call it a “tariff.” Please.

In case you’ve heard the name but not the history, Rube Goldberg was a cartoonist. He’s famous for his drawings of complex machines designed to perform common, uncomplicated tasks. Goldberg’s name is quasi-synonymous with pointless technology.

So, if you ask me, the name “RubeLab” doesn’t fit because the RubeStation is cool, anything but pointless and very real, as residents of Eustis, Florida can attest.

Who knows? Someday the RubeStation could wind up on the National Register of Historic Places as one of the first solar fueling stations in America. If that day comes, Bill Feree’s name might be as famous as Rube Goldberg’s.

Feree is the founder of RubeLab and one of the principals of Sunwise Power Systems, a Florida company that plans to take the RubeStation concept to market. Feree says the company has a sound business model, serious financing, one partner company with 25 years of experience in solar-panel installation and another in the metal fabrication business.

The idea is to build Sunwise power stations anywhere and everywhere people park their cars, like mall parking lots, street curbs and home driveways. You simply pull up in your electric car, jump out, plug in and forget it. The rig is fully fueled when you get back, he said, thus solving what he calls “range anxiety,” which has always been one of, if not the most significant impediment to establishing a genuine mass market for the electric car.

But that’s not all. Working in conjunction with smart-grid technology, Sunwise Power Systems plans to feed power from its dispersed stations to the electrical grid where it can be used to power homes and businesses. With that revenue stream as part of the business model, the cost of transportation fuel becomes laughably cheap.

In other words, if all goes well, Sunwise could make gas stations obsolete and render the price of gas irrelevant. Pay attention, Saudis. Not bad for a little company in Eustis.

Feree is a retired Delta Airlines pilot who serves as a member of the Eustis City Commission. He “retired” to Florida from New Hampshire but a 10-minute phone conversation is all it takes to appreciate the indefatigable entrepreneur in him. He’s a big believer in sustainable-energy technology as one of the great engines of American economic recovery.

And he’s not alone when it comes to seeing riches in sustainable energy. That could be both good news and bad for Sunwise. Google seems to find a way to monetize just about everything it touches.

Game on. Personally, I can’t wait to see it.