Opinion: Why a Data Center Wants Lakeland’s Power Instead of Duke’s
Two weeks ago, Lakeland Electric customers learned their bills are going up. On August 3, the City Commission voted 4 to 3 to pause new data centers and other very large power users for twelve months, including projects outside the city that want to buy Lakeland’s power. Those two facts belong in the same sentence, and the connection between them is the reason the second one matters.
Start with what Lakeland Electric actually serves. The largest single-site customer on the system is a Publix complex using about 18 megawatts, and it grew into that size gradually over many years. The utility has exactly one data center on its books. It sits 49th on the top-200 customer list and draws under half a megawatt at maximum load. In its entire history, Lakeland Electric has never had a customer walk in and ask for 50 to 100 megawatts at once.
Now open the utility’s own ten-year plan, the one Lakeland Electric filed with the state in 2023. It projected the winter peak at 684 megawatts for that year, rising to 740 megawatts by 2033. Even the high-growth scenario topped out at 750. During the deep freeze this past February, actual demand hit 792 megawatts. Lakeland blew past its own 2033 projection seven years early, and it did so before a single data center connected to anything.
The same plan tells you how much room is left. Lakeland Electric builds to a 15 percent reserve margin, the minimum the regional reliability council requires. Its own tables show the excess above that margin shrinking year by year, down to somewhere between 5 and 9 megawatts in winter by the early 2030s. Summer is tighter still, running between zero and five megawatts of excess for most of the decade, and Lakeland only gets there by buying 44 to 94 megawatts of firm power from outside the system. That is the honest picture of Lakeland’s cushion. Not a comfortable margin. A handful of megawatts, and a purchase order.
Hold that number. It is about to matter.
Most people in Polk County do not know that Tallahassee already decided how large customers are supposed to be handled. Senate Bill 484 passed this year, the Governor signed it May 7, and it took effect July 1. It created section 366.043 of the Florida Statutes, and the language is about as clear as legislation gets: a large load customer must bear its own full cost of service, and that cost may not be shifted to the general body of ratepayers. The statute spells out what counts, including connection, incremental transmission, incremental generation, other infrastructure, and operations and maintenance. It goes further and says the risk of nonpayment cannot land on everyone else either. A company cannot chop one project into smaller connections to slip under the line. Utilities covered by the law must file a compliant tariff with the Public Service Commission by October 1 of this year.
That is a good law, and it was not close.
SB 484 cleared the Florida Senate 37 to 0 and passed the House 92 to 16.
Here is the part that matters for Lakeland. Section 366.043 applies to “public utilities,” and it borrows that definition from section 366.02, which has said the same thing since 1951: a public utility does not include a municipality or any agency thereof. Lakeland Electric is a city department. Duke Energy and Tampa Electric are covered. Lakeland Electric is not.
So this fall, the investor-owned utilities in Florida will file tariffs proving that a large customer pays its own way. Lakeland Electric will file nothing, because nothing requires it to. That is not a scandal and it is not anyone’s fault. It is a gap, and it explains why a project of this size shows up asking to buy power from a city utility instead of from a company that answers to the PSC. You can see the difference inside our own county. A large project near Fort Meade buying power from Duke falls squarely under section 366.043. A project buying power from Lakeland Electric falls under nothing at all until Lakeland writes something.
The Legislature did give the city a tool. Section 163.326, also new this year, states that local governments keep their full authority over comprehensive planning and land development regulation for large load customers, and that a large load customer may not be treated as an electric substation under section 163.3208. In plain English, a data center does not get a shortcut around the land use process, and the city’s power to set terms is now written into state law.
Which brings us to the number Lakeland copied. The moratorium ordinance defines a large load customer at 50 megawatts, taken straight from the state statute. But that threshold was written for FPL and Duke, utilities that measure their systems in tens of thousands of megawatts. Drop it onto Lakeland Electric and a customer can sit at 49 megawatts, roughly ten times the entire reserve cushion this utility projects for the next decade, and never trigger a single requirement.
Lakeland Electric’s own rate book already knows better. In that same state filing, the utility defines its Extra-Large Demand Customer class as anyone whose billing demand exceeds 5,000 kilowatts at least three times in twelve months. Five megawatts. Lakeland Electric has been calling five megawatts extra-large for years while the new ordinance treats forty-nine as ordinary.
The permanent rules should set the trigger at the greater of 10 megawatts or one and a quarter percent of the prior year’s system peak. Ten is twice what this utility already treats as extra-large and a bit over half the Publix load, which is to say it is the first number in this conversation calibrated to this system rather than to somebody else’s.
Everything else can be copied from the state: the cost-of-service standard, the ban on shifting costs, the anti-splitting rule, and the financial tools section 366.043 already lists, including contributions in aid of construction, demand charges, financial guarantees, minimum load factors, take-or-pay provisions, and minimum contract terms with penalties for early exit. Nobody can call that radical. It passed the Florida Senate without a single no vote.
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One thing more, and it is the part residents will care about most. Whatever Lakeland builds for a customer like this, the city should extract the maximum community benefit the developer is willing to pay for, and it should ask before the deal is signed rather than after.
Lakeland already knows what that looks like. The city runs a Solar Battery Incentive Program that pays half the cost of a home battery, up to a thousand dollars, for customers with rooftop solar. As of the utility’s last full accounting, about eighty households had used it. Eighty. Funded out of the same ratepayer money that just went up. A single customer of the size we are discussing could pay to put that program in thousands of Lakeland homes without touching anyone’s bill, and no family in this city would have to wonder whether the data center is the reason their lights went out.
Sam Romain is Chairman of Americans for Energy Dominance and Chairman of the Polk County Republican Executive Committee. A North Lakeland resident, he appears regularly on Fox News and Fox Business on energy policy and grid reliability.
Nobody here is against technology, and Lakeland should not be. Growth built this city. But growth arriving on a system already running ahead of its own forecast, from a customer larger than anything the utility has ever served, is not a gift. It is a negotiation. Lakeland has twelve months, a state standard to copy, and statutory authority to act. Most cities do not get that. The only thing left to get right is the number.
Sam Romain is Chairman of Americans for Energy Dominance
This op-ed was submitted to The Citrus Tea and reflects the views of the author, not those of The Citrus Tea News LLC. The Citrus Tea does not endorse candidates or policy positions. Sam Romain is Chairman of Americans for Energy Dominance, an organization that advocates on national energy policy.
Responses and opposing viewpoints may be submitted to [email protected].
