A dozen Florida cities bought solar together: inside the Florida Municipal Solar Project

I. How a dozen cities pooled their money

If your electric bill comes from a city-run utility in Kissimmee, Ocala, or Wauchula rather than from Florida Power and Light or Duke, some of the power on your meter now traces back to large solar farms your city helped pay for without ever pouring a foundation itself. That is the quiet trick behind the Florida Municipal Solar Project, run by the Florida Municipal Power Agency (FMPA, the joint buying cooperative owned by a group of Florida's municipal electric utilities). Rather than each small town trying to finance and build its own array, roughly a dozen member cities signed on together to buy the output of a handful of utility-scale farms.

None of this is hidden. You can hold it against FMPA's own board filings, the resolutions your city commission passed to join, and the project's published list of sites and capacity. FMPA is what Florida law calls a joint-action agency, a public entity owned by its member utilities so they can do together what each is too small to do alone, and for the solar project it signed long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs, contracts to buy a plant's electricity at a set price for a set number of years) covering several large farms, then split that output among the members who chose to take part.

II. The honest math of buying big

NextEra Energy Resources built and operates the farms themselves, at sites on former pasture and citrus land in central Florida, and the cities put up no construction money. A single small municipal utility trying to build even a modest array faces fixed costs (engineering, interconnection studies, land, financing) that do not shrink just because the town is small. Pool a dozen cities into one contract for several farms totaling, at last public report, on the order of 370 megawatts across the sites, and those fixed costs spread across a much larger order, which is how joint procurement reaches a price per unit of energy a lone small utility usually cannot.

Here is the catch. A fixed-price contract is a bet in both directions: if natural gas prices stay low, the solar power can look expensive on paper in a given year, and if gas spikes, as it did across 2022, the locked-in solar price looks like a bargain. Neither the agency nor your city can tell you today which way that runs over twenty years, and anyone who claims to know is guessing.

III. What the signed terms locked in

Each signed PPA locks in three things worth understanding: a price for the energy, a term of roughly two decades, and a fixed allocation of each farm's output to each participating city. A member like Kissimmee Utility Authority or Ocala Electric Utility takes a set slice whether or not its own load grows as expected, which is the trade for the low price, and it is the part a reader should weigh when a commission votes to join or expand.

Because a private operator built and runs the farms, the day-to-day performance risk (a panel string down, an inverter failure, a hurricane crossing the Ridge) sits largely with the developer rather than with your city's budget. That matters in a state where an afternoon thunderstorm or a September storm can knock a site offline. What the cities carry instead is the standing obligation to keep buying, roughly for the life of the contract, which is a real commitment even when the headline is a clean-energy milestone.

IV. Worth watching this month

1. FMPA posts its board and committee meeting agendas on fmpa.com, usually monthly, and any vote to expand the solar project or add a member would likely surface there first.

2. Your own city commission's agenda is where a resolution to join or enlarge a solar purchase tends to appear, often weeks before it is final, and these items are routine until a dollar figure is attached.

3. The project's published site and capacity list is worth rechecking, since the total has grown in phases and the number you remember may be out of date.

4. The Florida Public Service Commission's open dockets on storm hardening and net metering can shift the economics around municipal solar, though municipal utilities sit largely outside its rate jurisdiction.

5. The U.S. Energy Information Administration's monthly Florida electricity data shows how fast solar's share of the state's generation is actually climbing, which is the honest backdrop to any single project's claims.