It’s called the Sunshine State for a reason. If there’s one resource Florida has plenty of, it’s sunlight. The state’s utility company, Florida Power and Light, is working to harness that advantage for the benefit of their customers. FPL announced that they will be building 30 million solar panels in the near future to provide energy for the state.
This represents a massive investment by the company and suggests a growing confidence in the technology. Once criticized for being cost-ineffective, solar power technology has improved vastly over the last several years and only continues to improve. Though the U.S. has been instrumental in the development of solar tech, it’s been a relatively slow adopter of it.
China, Japan, and Germany continue to out-pace the U.S. in terms of solar power production, but with projects like Florida’s, the gap may be closing. Though international agreements about power production (trying to move away from carbon-based sources of energy) continue to be ineffective, market-based motivations like lowering costs may slowly move power companies to renewable energy.
Whether it will be soon enough is a separate issue. Regions like Florida that are expected to be especially hard hit by climate change because of its low altitude and being surrounded on three sides by ocean may experience even stronger motivation to make the transition as time goes on.
