It was nearly 100 degrees, one of the hottest days during the hottest summer on global record when Tallahassee’s City Commission voted unanimously to approve its Clean Energy Plan — a guide for the city to run on net 100% renewable energy by 2050. The plan lays out actions for the rest of this decade, but how the city will reach that end goal is still being determined.
At the August meeting, the overall tone was celebratory. During public comment before the vote, Rev. Kim Buchanan of Tally Green Sing walked up to the mic with a guitar in hand to perform an original musical number. The chorus lyrics went, ”turning Tally greener really won’t be that hard. Turning Tally greener let’s everyone do our part.”
There is a plan that the city can achieve and there’s community-wide support, but it’s optimistic to say getting there won’t be hard. Right now, nearly all —about 95% — of Tallahassee's electricity is powered by gas, a fossil fuel. While gas does have lower carbon emissions than coal, it’s almost entirely methane, which traps more heat than carbon.
Michael Ohlsen is Tallahassee’s Clean Energy Plan Manager. Now that the plan has been approved he says it’s “on to the fun part—implementation.”
More solar is the clearest next step
As the plan manager, Ohlsen is its public spokesperson and inter-department coordinator. An engineer by training, his idea of fun is taking on necessary challenges that don’t have straightforward answers.
“I define fun by the challenge of it,” he said, “and probably equally the excitement around it.”
He’ll oversee implementation of the plan’s 87 potential actions over the rest of the decade, from increasing residential solar to electrifying the city fleet. But the biggest impact will come from changing what powers the electricity grid. As renewable sources become able to handle the same capacity as the gas power plants, ultimately the city could retire the old plants.
In order to guide the city toward its 2050 goal, Ohlsen’s team needed an idea of what the utility-scale energy mix will look like by midcentury: the broad category of renewable energy includes different options that would require different pathways to build. Transitioning from a gas-powered system to a renewable one means going from three power plants providing nearly all of the city's energy to a more diverse, more distributed model.
“It's hard to predict next year, let alone the year 2050 or hopefully sooner,” Ohlsen says. “We took a stab at it, though.”
The city commissioned an energy planning report that lays out eight possible pathways, including a massive expansion of solar farms, emerging technologies like fuel cells and small modular nuclear reactors, and importing wind energy from out West. Some ideas also considered reducing but not eliminating gas and paying for credits. This would still allow the city to achieve its goal of net 100% renewable energy: the net target means the city can balance out emissions through payments intended to support clean energy projects elsewhere.
While the city hoped one pathway would be a clear choice to aim for in 2050, it wasn’t so obvious.
“That was the hope,” Ohlsen says, “that magically one of these pathways would emerge as the most cost effective, the most technically feasible, the one we could jump on and go. Instead, all of them, as you might imagine, had trade offs.”
Building out 1,000 MW of solar energy would be enough to retire a projected 85% of gas capacity by 2035 — but it would take more than 13 square miles of land, the equivalent of converting everything within a 2 mile radius of the capitol into a solar farm. Adopting small nuclear reactors could cover an estimated half of the city’s energy supply — but it’s unlikely construction could start on these projects before 2040.
But there were common themes across all options. Increasing the city’s solar energy supply was one of the most consistent. So that's where the city is starting: with planning a new solar farm.The plan is to build one big enough to produce up to 200 MW of renewable energy by 2030. The location hasn’t been determined yet.
“The largest contribution to our clean energy transition, quite literally, will come overnight when we power on the next solar farm,” Ohlsen says.
Right now, the solar farm next to the airport is the city’s sole source of renewable energy. It generates a maximum of 62 MW, enough to power on average 62,000 homes. All of the solar energy produced joins the city’s grid and ends up in the same bucket as energy produced by gas, but the city has designated the power produced by the solar farm to cover all city buildings, non-residential customers like FSU, FAMU, and Leon County Schools, as well as nearly 2,000 homes. Customers in the program are locked into a fixed rate until 2037 which, like the overall renewable market, is currently higher than the standard gas rate but it’s expected to be lower in the long-term.
The new farm will be coupled with battery storage, which will allow the city to access energy gathered from the sun even when the sun is not shining.
“There's historically been this mindset of, either solar is working, it's on or it's off, or the wind is blowing or it's not,” says Sherry Stout, the State, Local, and Tribal program manager at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “Realistically, renewables can be curtailed just like any other power plant.”
Across the country, she has seen utilities looking at their systems more holistically — looking at both how much electricity is needed and how it’s being generated. Like Tallahassee, they are considering different supply and storage options that make sense in their region.
“The mechanisms to switch toward a renewable system have gotten much more sophisticated than they were about 10 years ago,” Stout says.
Tallahassee has more control over its energy decisions because the city owns its utility company
As Tallahassee goes about its energy transition it has a major advantage over many other cities: it’s a municipal utility.
“The really important part that cities understand well from a utility perspective is that the city of Tallahassee is not a monolith,” Stout says. “Every neighborhood is going to be different. You've got houses that are very old. You've got houses that are very new. You have different ethnic groups represented. You have different socioeconomic statuses represented.”
City municipal utilities are able to take all of that diversity into consideration when reimagining how energy is generated and distributed across the city, she says.
There's also the advantage of having control over the utility’s decision-making, says Alissa Schafer, a research and communications manager for the watchdog Energy and Policy Institute. Most cities in Florida get their power from an investor-owned utility, like Florida Power and Light or Duke Energy. Since Tallahassee’s utility is owned and operated by the city, the City Commission and, ultimately, city residents have the power to decide how the city sources its energy. They also own all the infrastructure, from power stations to transmission lines.
“So when they say, ‘Hey, we want to transition to 100 percent renewable energy,’ in theory, they have a much more direct and a shorter path to do that just because they control those assets,” Schafer says.
But there are limits on what Tallahassee can do. During the 2023 legislative session, the state passed a bill that prevents cities from prohibiting appliances that run on a specific type of energy — basically a ban on gas bans. As long as residents have gas stoves or water heaters in their homes, gas will have to remain available.
“In a perfect world, we would have all the tools in the toolbox available to us as we transition away from fossil fuels,” Schafer says. “Unfortunately, we don't live in a perfect world. We live in Florida.”
Florida is one of the top five states for gas consumption in the country, using about 5% of the US total. Tallahassee uses gas in two systems: the electricity system, which burns gas to run its power plants, and the gas system itself, which pipes the fuel straight to peoples’ homes and businesses. The amount of gas running directly to peoples’ homes to power these appliances is small — about 10% — compared to the gas powering the city’s electric grid. But the city does encourage gas use by offering rebates of up to $700 for residents to switch to a gas appliance. Schafer says the city should increase incentives for renewables instead.
That’s something that City Commissioner Jeremy Matlow would like to see the commission take up in the near future. The city has already eliminated rebates for higher end gas appliances, like spa heaters.
“Number one is, let's stop incentivizing it, right?” Matlow says. “We are not required by any means to give incentives to continue to install gas.”
Getting rid of those incentives is one of the priorities for the Tally 100% Together coalition, a local advocacy group housed within ReThink Florida Energy. The coalition pushed for the initial resolution codifying the city’s 2050 net renewable goal and provided feedback on the Clean Energy Plan.
The plan states that the city “will continue to provide financial incentives” in the form of loans, grants, and rebates to make the transition to clean energy more affordable, but the only ones specifically listed are related to electric vehicles and energy efficiency.
Tallahassee’s specific pathway to net renewable energy in 2050 remains a longer term question. This year, the request for proposals will open up for the new solar farm. But there are starting places: all those actions laid out in the clean energy plan . And Ohlsen, the city’s Clean Energy Plan Manager, says he’s working on them.
“This transition won't happen overnight,” Ohlsen says, “but that's not because we don't have our foot on the throttle.”