When the wind blows hard in Florida, people take cover. But the wind doesn’t blow hard enough often enough to support wind farms. “There’s not a wind farm within a thousand miles of our office,” says Mike O’Sullivan, senior vice president of NextEra Energy Resources, an independent power producer that is part of the FPL Group, which is based in Juno Beach, Florida. That hasn’t prevented FPL from becoming America’s No. 1 producer of wind power.
“GE, Goldman Sachs, BP – all the guys you read about – they don’t have even a fraction of what we have invested in renewables, even though they run some pretty fancy ads,” O’Sullivan says.
Perhaps because it’s tucked away in south Florida, FPL doesn’t much attention. But the company, with 2008 revenues of more than $16 billion, about 39,000 megawatts of generating capacity, and more than 15,000 employees in 27 states and Canada, has become a leading generator of low-carbon energy. Notice I didn’t say renewable energy; about 28% of the FPL Group’s electricity generation comes from nuclear power, which is low-carbon, whether environmentalists like it or not. Among the top 50 electric power generators in the U.S., FPL ranks No. 8 (meaning it is among the cleanest) in terms of carbon emissions per megawatt hour of generation. Interestingly, those ranked higher (meaning they burn even fewer fossil fuels) include PG&E, Exelon, Entergy and Constellation, all of which own nukes.
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