Hard To Greenwash, Be Believed When You Run Fake Political Candidates, Illegally Surveil Journalists

[hatrack]

Florida’s largest utility has a lot of explaining to do after news organizations revealed some unseemly conduct. The reports show that Florida Power & Light hired a political consulting firm that engaged in dirty tricks to harm or otherwise neutralize the company’s perceived opponents, including elected officials and journalists.

Some of this—like turning a news website into a mouthpiece for the utility or surveilling a newspaper columnist in the hopes of catching him doing something embarrassing—sounds like the stuff of conspiracy theories. FPL has said it was not fully aware of what its consultant was doing, and it has cast doubt on some of the reporting. But the company is limited in what it can do to defend itself because of reams of evidence, in leaked emails and texts, showing that company executives were aware of at least some of what was happening.

EDIT

I’m interested in what happened with FPL, but I’m also looking at whether this cascade of revelations could harm the utility’s parent company, NextEra Energy, which happens to be the largest generator of renewable energy in the United States, and maybe the world. NextEra, also based in Florida, has become a giant by racking up profits from its regulated utility business at FPL and using that as a foundation to build wind, solar and battery projects across the United States and Canada. Other utilities have tried similar strategies, but none have done it on the scale of NextEra.

EDIT

I wonder if NextEra’s problems in Florida may eventually affect the perception of the company in other places. To help figure this out, I reached out to David Pomerantz, who makes a living investigating utility companies as executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute, a nonprofit watchdog organization. He started by questioning my premise that NextEra has a good reputation while its subsidiary, FPL, has taken some serious hits. He pointed to some of NextEra’s conduct outside of Florida, like its opposition to a power line in Maine that would have delivered renewable energy from Canada and harmed the market for a nuclear plant co-owned by the company. That said, he acknowledges there is a “cognitive dissonance” between NextEra’s status as a major player in the transition to renewable energy and FPL’s status as a utility that relies heavily on fossil fuels, with a reputation for fighting dirty in defending its interests.

EDIT

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/04082022/inside-clean-energy-dirty-scandal-for-clean-energy-leader/

[Haggard Celine]

1. Go up against the energy industry and expect

evil, dirty tricks to make you stop. They'll do anything. Anything. To protect their interests.

[Phoenix61]

2. FPL sucks! They bought out the coop that serves my area.

First time I’ve ever had a power bill over $200. The real kicker is I had attic space insulated with spray foam. Of course with DeSatan’s appointees on the regulatory board it’s not exactly shocking.