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Fla. regulators greenlight FPL's Dania Beach gas plant

State regulators on March 1 unanimously approved Florida Power & Light Co.'s application to build a 1,163-MW gas-fired plant.

The Florida Public Service Commission's discussion of and vote on the Dania Beach combined-cycle unit took three minutes, as regulatory staff recommended in February that commissioners grant the NextEra Energy Inc. subsidiary's petition.

However, a series of January hearings saw heated debate between officials at Florida Power & Light and attorneys for the Sierra Club and the Florida Office of Public Counsel, which both opposed Dania Beach. They warned against plant emissions and ratepayer impact.

But the argument of reliability ultimately won out, resonating with commissioners and staff.

"I think reliability is obviously paramount with this recommendation," Commissioner Julie Brown said at the PSC's March 1 meeting. "This area accounts for 44% of FPL's overall load."

Dania Beach will replace two aging gas-fired units at FPL's Lauderdale site now slated for retirement. The new facility's total construction cost will be $888 million with a scheduled completion date of June 2022.

Constructing a combined-cycle unit is the most cost-effective option to replace the retiring capacity, FPL has said. It would have cost $337 million to keep the Lauderdale site running, and $1.3 billion to replace it with an equivalent amount of solar and storage capacity.

In their February recommendation, PSC staff found the utility's proposed financial, fuel and environmental costs associated with Dania Beach are reasonable, and thus eligible to be recovered from customers. They acknowledged that while the unit will not improve FPL's energy mix, Dania Beach's efficiency will allow the utility to reduce the total amount of gas needed to serve its customers.

Environmentalists seized on this point during the January hearings. "Locking FPL's ratepayers into a massive, expensive gas plant today robs them of the benefits of clean energy precisely when utilities across the country and across the world are reducing cost and risk by rapidly moving into a renewable energy future," Sierra Club attorney Julie Kaplan told commissioners.

Kaplan and an Office of Public Counsel lawyer also cited FPL's own projections that it will only need 54 MW of generation in 2024 to boost its reserve margin. Dania Beach, they argued, will be a costly, polluting addition to the utility's portfolio, especially when a transmission line is set to deliver 1,200 MW to customers in 2019.

PSC staff asserted in their recommendation, however, that "there is value in evaluating multiple reliability perspectives in order to maintain reliability and integrity of the grid and (staff) expects FPL to maintain reliability as it has stated with the proposed [Dania Beach] Unit 7."