While Florida’s political leadership continues to attack renewable energy, electric vehicles and anything that’s related to sustainability, Texas, the home of a deregulated power industry and right-wing oil barons is going in a different direction.
From PBS:
The Florida Squeeze 
I don’t think this story can be fully understood without looking at the role of Florida Power & Light and it’s parent company Nextera(which used to be called FPL Group) BOTH inside of Florida and outside Florida(It is also essentially a single company located in the same corporate campus in Juno Beach BTW). Something unknown I think even to a lot of politically active Floridians is the size of Nextera’s(and I am just going to call it FPL going forward) renewable energy business outside of Florida and it’s deep ties to national Democratic Party politicians OUTSIDE of Florida. Chuck Schumer’s daughter for example works as a “national” lobbyist for FPL for example. FPL additionally has been known for it’s close ties to Kathy Hochul.
Now I can’t say what exactly FPL corporate game plan is(other than to make money) but I think there are two questions that need to be asked. One is to what extent is FPL using it’s monopoly “Regulated” business in Florida to subsidize unregulated out of state businesses in places like New York and Texas. Second if I was say a South Florida Democrat that hung around in the same political circles that Schumer and Hochul do I might be a little pissed and question Schumer and Hochul publicly why they are palling around with a company that in repeated has really had it in for the FL Democratic Party. Does Schumer actually had ANY interest in ever winning a US Senate seat in Florida or has he just written the state off.
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Second point I will make is there is also a real Federal vs State divide in the Democratic Party on energy and electricity matters that is fairly unrelated to progressive vs corporatist divides. That is that the Federal Executive branch under Biden and to a lesser extent Obama and Congressional Democrats are closer to big electric utilities than many state and local level Democrats. A perfect example of this is in George where George Power has in many ways perhaps been the “closest” electric utility in the nation to both Obama and Biden’s Department of Energy(and Obama’s Secretary of Energy serves on Georgia’s Power board of directors) yet Georgia Power isn’t exactly a beloved corporate entity among state and local Georgia Democrats. But then again I don’t think Georgia is nearly as anti Democratic Party as FPL is at the state level and at no point have Georgia Democrats at the Federal level like Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff raised any objections against GA Power’s close ties to the Biden Admin(Hence my contention that this really isn’t a progressive vs corporatist thing).
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