Florida Power & Light's political consultants secretly used the company's money to pay for a spoiler candidate's salary and rent as he challenged then-Miami-Dade County Commissioner Daniella Levine Cava. The scheme appears to have violated campaign finance law.

Florida Power & Light had a problem. A strong Democratic challenger was threatening to unseat a friendly Republican incumbent in a Gainesville-area state Senate race in 2018. FPL, one of the country’s largest utilities, needed to make sure the GOP held onto the seat. So FPL used a shadowy nonprofit group to secretly bankroll a spoiler candidate, a longtime Democrat named Charles Goston, according to new documents obtained by the Miami Herald. Running as a no-party candidate in the general election, Goston helped split the liberal vote, siphoning off enough votes from the Democratic challenger to swing the race to the GOP incumbent.

NOTE: I didn't write this but it provides important context for my coverage of FPL. When Florida Power & Light faced a spate of bad publicity and political blowback, a small but ambitious news website called the Capitolist sprang to the public utility’s defense. Taking aim at foes of FPL’s proposed rate hikes and controversial attempts to buy Jacksonville’s public utility, the Capitolist savaged the critics, impugning their motives and suggesting they were part of “dark money” schemes.

Gov. Ron DeSantis surprised many in Florida’s environmental community when he vetoed Florida Power & Light’s priority bill that was intended to reduce rooftop solar expansion in Florida. Solar advocates said it was a signal the governor had put “energy freedom ahead of monopoly utility profit margins.” But in conservative Northwest Florida, residents say they deserve some of the credit, as their outrage at FPL and it’s handling of winter price hikes became a catalyst in the bill’s demise.

Florida homeowners and businesses would be given 18 months to install rooftop solar before financial incentives are reduced. But utilities get new benefits: the chance to charge everyone if they lose money.

The argument — that some customers subsidize other customers — is at the heart of the utility industry’s push to change the “net metering” financial terms that have helped expand the solar power industry. Opponents argue that there is no data to justify the claim but also point to another reason to oppose the net metering legislation in Florida: the utility industry’s own contradictions over subsidies.

Should the state’s investor-owned utilities — FPL, Duke and Tampa Electric — own the charging stations or should gas stations and charging manufacturers be allowed to compete? The question is at the heart of what is emerging as an electric vehicle charging war in the Florida Legislature.

Florida Power & Light has launched an unusual public attack on the Miami Herald and its senior Tallahassee reporter over coverage of the utility company’s lobbying on solar power policy — criticism the paper’s top editor called “unfair.”

The biggest power company in the US is pushing policy changes that would hamstring rooftop solar power in Florida, delivering legislation for a state lawmaker to introduce, according to records obtained by the Miami Herald and Floodlight.

Rooftop solar power generation in Florida is still a nascent industry, but Florida Power & Light, the nation’s largest power company, is pushing to hamstring it — by writing and delivering legislation the company asked state lawmakers to introduce, according to records obtained by the Miami Herald and Floodlight.

Florida Power & Light witnesses admitted to state regulators this week that its proposed $1.53 billion increase in rates over the next four years will cost residential customers disproportionately more than the rate increase imposed on the state’s largest commercial and industrial businesses.

As Florida Power & Light prepares to ask state regulators for the largest rate increase in state history — expecting its customers to pay at least $6.2 billion more over four years — a mysterious adversary has emerged.

Amid opposition to a proposed settlement agreement that would impose the largest rate increase in state history on Florida Power & Light’s residential customers, state utility regulators on Wednesday decided to spend two months getting feedback on the legal and practical impact of the proposal before approving it.

Utility insider is caught on tape admitting the industry attempted to deceive voters into supporting restrictions on the expansion of solar by falsely portraying a constitutional amendment as a pro-solar plan. After our story, support plummeted and the amendment failed.

The colossal fight to open electricity generation to competition in Florida — which is being led by a Gainesville-based natural gas marketing company — made its way before the new-look Florida Supreme Court on Wednesday and it became clear the constitutional amendment drive is no David v. Goliath battle. It looked more like David versus the world.

As a new law took effect July 7, declaring that petition signatures are invalid if they are not certified within 30 days, Citizen Voters unloaded hundreds of thousands of petitions to elections offices. They’re calling it the “big dump” — and some are asking if it was an intentional ploy to sabotage liberal-leaning amendments.

A secretive organization with the goal of thwarting amendments approved by voters after the 2020 election cycle has spent more than $800,000 on paid petition gatherers in the last four months, using funds from undisclosed sources and raising the specter of another high stakes fight over the future of energy regulation in Florida. The organization calls itself Keep Our Constitution Clean and says its purpose is to keep the state’s premier legal document uncluttered by special interest measures.

After Gov. Rick Scott appointed a former legislator with no utility experience to the board that regulates Florida utilities, we took a look at how he used his campaign account.

We took a look at the expenditures of a state senator's political committee and found he had hired a former Hooters “calendar girl” and a Playboy model with no political experience as campaign consultants. After our questioning, the senator, already under Senate investigation, resigned.