JEA can't say right now how their customers' electric bills would be affected by newly proposed greenhouse gas emissions by the Obama Administration.
“You know in another month, we’ll know a lot better as to all the details,” says JEA Chief Public Affairs Officer Bud Para.
He says the rules are 626 pages long not counting the appendices, and they just got them in this week.
The Environmental Protection Agency under the Obama Administration wants to reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent by 2030. Florida would have to reduce by 38 percent.
“This is a rule that we’d been expecting for years,” Para says. “Of course, we didn’t know the details.”
He says they’ve been preparing for a fuel switch. The last three plants JEA built use natural gas instead of coal, which generated 65 percent of the company’s electricity last year. Para says two new nuclear units are being built in Georgia and will come online around 2017. JEA has also been experimenting with renewable energy: land-filled gas, bio mass, solar, and a “little bit of wind.”
“There’s not much energy in renewables in Florida at this time,” Para says. “That’s something that we’ll have to increase.”
WOKV plans to check back in with JEA in a month to see if they know more as to how much it could cost to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, and how that could potentially affect customers’ electric bills.
