Florida does not need convincing that its climate is changing; it needs a plan for living with what’s already happening. It is the state where the most hurricanes make landfall in the country, and warming Gulf waters and rising seas are now supercharging their storm surge. Those storms are the biggest reason Florida has racked up roughly $389 billion in weather and climate disaster costs since 1980, among the highest totals of any state. And that’s just the dramatic stuff: on an ordinary Tuesday, Florida is also simply the hottest state in the country, and its biggest metro areas contend with serious air pollution, much of it tailpipe exhaust from a transportation sector that alone eats up 40 percent of the state’s energy consumption. None of this lands evenly — it’s Black, Latino, and low-income communities who absorb the worst of both the storms and the smog.

Amanda Campos, a South Florida resident who researched a full decarbonization roadmap for the state, argues that Florida doesn’t actually need to wait for its politics to catch up with its problems. Building on prior modeling from Stanford’s Mark Jacobson and coauthors, along with roadmaps from The Solutions Project and The Nature Conservancy, she lays out a path to a 100 percent wind-water-solar grid by 2050. The starting point is a number: business-as-usual demand would push Florida’s power needs to about 107 gigawatts by mid-century. But electrification itself shrinks that number dramatically — heat pumps beat combustion for heating and cooling, electric arc furnaces beat gas for industrial heat, and battery-electric and hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles are simply more efficient than anything burning gasoline. Run the state’s economy on electricity instead of combustion, and the 2050 demand figure drops to roughly 66.7 gigawatts. Subtract the 1.9 gigawatts of wind-water-solar Florida already has, and the real target is about 64.7 gigawatts of new clean power.

Solar carries most of that load, and for obvious reasons: this is, after all, the Sunshine State, ranking 8th nationally for rooftop solar potential. Just the rooftops of the state’s homes, stores, and government buildings could theoretically host 76 gigawatts of panel capacity, which nets out to about 17.4 gigawatts of actual output once you account for how much sun those roofs really get. Rooftop solar is also the most expensive way to get there — residential installations cost far more per watt than utility-scale farms, and those costs have stopped falling in recent years even as utility-scale costs keep dropping. So the bulk of the buildout, in this plan, happens on land: an estimated 28.6 gigawatts from utility-scale solar farms built on a mix of former farmland and undeveloped acreage — typically at least 30 acres a project — plus community and agrivoltaic projects that let farmers keep growing crops underneath the panels while selling the surplus power locally. That kind of conversion isn’t just land use; in at least one Florida county, turning a citrus grove into a solar farm brought millions in new labor income to the community. Even the 451,000 acres of Lake Okeechobee show up in the land inventory.

Then there’s concentrated solar power — mirrors that focus sunlight to generate heat rather than electricity directly, which means it can store energy as heat and dispatch power on demand, even after dark. Florida already runs the only solar-thermal plant east of the Rockies, the 75-megawatt Martin Next Generation Solar Energy Center, and Campos’s plan leans on more of it: an estimated 14 gigawatts of potential, trimmed down to about 10.4 gigawatts once the numbers are balanced against everything else, precisely because CSP costs are projected to fall sharply by 2030 and its storage capability is uniquely valuable.

Wind is the wild card. Florida currently has exactly zero installed wind capacity, and the state’s onshore wind resource is genuinely mediocre. Offshore is where the real potential sits — an estimated 8.4 gigawatts from 3,500 turbines — but utilities have been reluctant, partly over fears that hurricanes will simply shred the turbines. That fear turns out to be overstated: turbines with backup power to reorient themselves in a storm face less than a 5 percent chance, over 20 years, of losing more than 10 percent of a wind farm to a hurricane, and turbines may even modestly weaken the hurricanes that hit them. Add that offshore wind to the solar mix and the total output actually overshoots the 64.7-gigawatt target — which is by design, since some overbuilding helps cover demand on days when storage alone can’t.

The politics here are stranger than the engineering. Florida’s state leadership, under Governor Ron DeSantis, has been openly dismissive of climate policy. But the state’s largest utility, Florida Power & Light — a subsidiary of NextEra Energy, the largest renewable power generator on the planet — has its own “Real Zero” plan to eliminate its carbon emissions through solar buildout, and in the second half of 2023 alone, Florida installed more solar than any other state in the country. The state also already offers real incentives — sales-tax and property-tax exemptions, and net metering for more than 80 percent of Floridians, paying homeowners close to the full retail rate for solar power they send back to the grid. DeSantis has even vetoed a utility-backed bill that would have gutted those net-metering rates, citing fears of higher bills during a period of high inflation. Good economics, in other words, keeps winning out over bad politics.

What good economics hasn’t fixed is who actually gets to benefit from all this. Despite ranking among the top few states for total solar capacity, Florida ranks a modest 23rd for solar generation per capita — a gap that traces straight back to affordability. With Florida’s median household income around $66,776, a typical residential solar system still runs about $22,157 even after the 30 percent federal tax credit and state incentives — nearly a third of a median household’s annual income, and effectively out of reach for the roughly one-third of Florida households earning under $40,000 a year. Since rooftop costs have largely stopped falling, waiting for the market to solve this on its own isn’t a strategy. Campos’s proposal calls for income-targeted tax credits and expanded municipal rebate programs — Tampa and Boynton Beach both already offer rebates above $1,000 — along with steering those same incentives toward nonprofit- and community-owned solar projects, so that the households least able to install their own panels can still buy into the transition collectively.

A statewide renewable mandate isn’t politically realistic right now, and Campos doesn’t pretend otherwise. But she’s betting that it doesn’t need to be. Florida solar is already expected to supply more than a quarter of the state’s electricity by 2032, built not by mandate but by utilities chasing the cheapest available power. The transition, in this telling, isn’t a question of if — it’s a question of whether it arrives fast enough, and fairly enough, to actually help the people paying for Florida’s hurricanes and heat today.

Photo Credit: Zack Wittman/NYT