Before customers pay, Florida’s largest transmission project deserves closer review

• As Florida invests in major transmission infrastructure to meet growing electricity demand, rigorous review is essential to ensure projects are necessary, cost-effective and in the public interest.
• EDF’s appeal asks the Florida Supreme Court to ensure Florida’s largest recent transmission project receives the level of scrutiny warranted before its costs are passed on to customers.

Like many other parts of the country, Florida needs more transmission to deliver electricity where demand is greatest. A modern electric grid depends on it.

Because new grid infrastructure requires major capital investment, the best practice is to optimize planning so selected projects can meet multiple system needs while minimizing costs for customers over the long term. This proceeding illustrates the risks of evaluating transmission projects in isolation rather than considering whether broader regional planning could identify more cost-effective solutions.

As electricity demand grows and extreme weather intensifies, utilities must invest in grid infrastructure that maintains reliability, strengthens resilience and delivers the lowest-cost electricity to customers. Those investments should meet a straightforward standard: before customers pay hundreds of millions (or even billions) of dollars for new infrastructure, utilities must demonstrate that a project is necessary, supported by evidence showing it is the most cost-effective solution available.

But in Florida, nearly all transmission infrastructure is built based on isolated, local reliability assessments that rarely consider the economic or resilience needs of the broader power system. Despite federal requirements, Florida’s three major investor-owned utilities – Florida Power & Light, Duke Energy Florida and Tampa Electric Company – routinely skip transmission studies that rigorously evaluate the existing grid through this regional lens.

Nor have they agreed to build, or even consider, a regional transmission project that benefits multiple utilities and their customers under a single investment. Such an approach would route power flow more efficiently, create a more resilient network with alternate pathways for electricity to reach consumers during stress events, and drastically reduce overall system costs.

Instead, Florida families and businesses are forced to foot the bill for massive infrastructure projects that often ignore cheaper, more effective alternatives. Florida’s investor-owned utilities have zero incentive to pursue lower-cost options or share project costs. Because of how they are regulated, their financial incentive points in the opposite direction: The more infrastructure they build and own, the higher their guaranteed profits – which customers pay on their bills. The rate of profit Florida’s utilities are allowed to earn is also rising, and now among the highest in the country. Meanwhile, customers face increasingly unaffordable electric bills, with the average household bill up 20% since 2021.

State utility commissions exist to restrain this dynamic: The larger the price tag, the more rigorous their scrutiny must be. This is critical to their mission of ensuring reliable service at fair and reasonable rates for customers. In this case, however, the Florida Public Service Commission failed to apply that level of scrutiny before approving FPL’s $782 million Andytown-Oasis transmission project. That is why EDF is asking the Florida Supreme Court to review the Commission’s decision.

A closer look at the evidence

In March, FPL petitioned the Commission for a “determination of need” to construct the Andytown-Oasis project, one of the most expensive local transmission projects ever proposed in Florida. If it moves forward, FPL’s captive customers will bear the full cost. Recognizing the staggering financial impact, EDF intervened to ensure the proposal received the rigorous public scrutiny it demands.

As with most of its major infrastructure builds, FPL based its proposal on a highly localized reliability assessment, concluding that four new high-voltage transmission lines, several upgraded substations, and a new substation were necessary to serve customers in Miami-Dade County.

EDF’s experts identified significant flaws in FPL’s analysis, raising questions as to whether an assessment designed around a narrow set of reliability scenarios could justify a project of this size. By ignoring regional planning mandates and operational alternatives, FPL failed to evaluate solutions that could address multiple system needs simultaneously and deliver far greater long-term value for customers.

Rather than addressing these issues, FPL sought to exclude our expert testimony through a series of unsuccessful motions. We successfully opposed those efforts, ensuring the Commission had the benefit of independent analysis identifying flaws in FPL’s proposal. EDF has worked in Florida for decades and represents thousands of members in the state, many of whom are FPL ratepayers with a direct stake in this decision.

Why regional planning matters

Planning transmission one project at a time, while ignoring current and likely future conditions across the broader system, misses opportunities to solve multiple grid challenges with a single, efficient investment. Across the country, modern planning approaches are driving a paradigm shift with the recognition that evaluating the grid regionally (not just within one utility service territory or pocket thereof) will identify projects that improve reliability, reduce congestion and lower costs across the entire electric system.

EDF asked the Commission to consider how broader regional planning could inform whether FPL’s proposal was truly the most prudent and cost-effective solution. Instead, the Commission concluded that regional planning was entirely irrelevant to its determination of need and even claimed it lacked jurisdiction to consider the federal regional planning processes Florida utilities are legally required to undergo, despite the Commission’s documented role as an indispensable party to regional planning decisions.

By putting blinders on, the Commission deprives itself of critical knowledge about the utilities it regulates and abdicates its statutory obligation to oversee prudent transmission planning. The consequences reach far beyond this single case: If regulators refuse to consider regional planning when evaluating massive capital projects, Florida ratepayers will keep missing out on better, cheaper energy solutions and continue overpaying for electricity.

The ultimate irony? FPL fully understands the immense value of regional transmission from its own experience decades ago. In the mid-1980s, FPL built a 628-mile transmission corridor connecting its grid with Georgia Power’s system to import cheaper out-of-state coal generation and displace its expensive oil units.

That initiative, worth more than $1 billion in today’s dollars, was a major interregional project that bridged Florida with the broader Southeastern grid while benefiting consumers. FPL proved decades ago that regional transmission can drive down system costs. The Commission must require it to do so again.

Advanced technologies can enhance ratepayer benefits

Proper review also requires looking beyond the utility’s preferred hardware solutions. Decades of innovation have produced advanced hardware and software, including Grid-Enhancing Technologies, that can address many transmission needs at lower cost and with far quicker deployment. Yet utilities rarely select them because cheaper solutions mean lower guaranteed returns.

FPL never evaluated whether these faster-to-deploy, lower-cost “non-wires” technologies could address its stated reliability needs, and the Commission gave it a free pass. FPL’s alternative project proposals merely changed the geographic route, not the underlying technology, of the Andytown-Oasis project. Yet regulators debated only these alternative paths for the same expensive wires.

Absent from the review was any meaningful evaluation of options like dynamic line rating, advanced power flow control, transmission-tied battery storage, or generation re-dispatch, all of which can relieve grid congestion and maximize existing capacity while minimizing power outage risk for a fraction of the cost of new lines. By failing to require utilities to study these technologies, the Commission lets monopolies default to the most capital-intensive option available.

Better scrutiny leads to better decisions

The Commission’s review moved at an extraordinary pace. For a nearly $800 million capital investment, EDF had only 13 days to digest FPL’s sprawling filings, analyze hundreds of pages of technical grid modeling, prepare comprehensive expert testimony, and file our motion to intervene.

Despite those constraints, our experts exposed glaring holes in FPL’s load forecasting assumptions that inappropriately attributed speculative data center growth to Miami-Dade County, challenged its isolated modeling that applied incorrect line ratings and highlighted its failure to evaluate regional or non-wires alternatives. That participation helped ensure these issues became part of the record the Florida Supreme Court will now review.

Strong regulatory decisions depend on comprehensive, rigorous records. Independent experts and consumer advocates help ensure regulators see the unvarnished facts rather than operating in an echo chamber. However, when the proceeding is so compressed and the Commission’s review process is forced to be so cursory, it inhibits other stakeholders from participating and usually limits the inputs to the utility’s own assertions, making that echo chamber virtually impossible for the Commission to avoid.

Why this appeal matters

This appeal is about much more than a single transmission project. As electricity demand surges nationwide, utilities are proposing ever larger investments even though federal rules require them to plan transmission across service territories, looking twenty years ahead and weighing reliability, economic, and public policy benefits. When utilities move forward with projects before adequately evaluating whether broader regional solutions could meet the same needs at lower cost, they can short-circuit tomorrow’s regional investments, saddle customers with higher bills and erode the incentive to build a truly interconnected grid.

The strongest transmission projects are the ones that withstand careful review because the evidence shows they are needed, cost-effective, and in the public interest. EDF’s appeal asks the Florida Supreme Court to apply that standard before Florida’s largest transmission project in recent history lands on customers’ bills.