Politics
Zachary Colletti: Socialism won’t lower Florida energy bills
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This post on the Democratic Socialists of America’s own publication says it all.
They claim their policies will lower, if not completely cancel, your electricity bill. What do you really get? Unreliable power, paying more for less, and the surrender of our grid to bureaucrats and politicians. It’s anti-American, and it’s certainly anti-Florida. But with self-proclaimed Democratic Socialists on the ballot in our own state, it’s important to remind ourselves what lies beneath their catchy slogans and rosy promises.
In 2007, socialist Venezuela nationalized its electricity sector. On March 7, 2019, a brush fire under a transmission corridor took down all 23 states for more than five days and most cities for more than 90 hours. Routine brush clearing beneath the Guri lines had stopped three years earlier. Ninety-six percent of telecommunications went dark, hospital deaths were counted in the dozens, and Venezuela never recovered. As of May this year, everywhere outside Caracas is experiencing rolling blackouts, and Zulia residents are losing power for six or more hours a day, with no storm in sight.
In 2024, Hurricanes Helene and Milton inflicted historic levels of damage on the Tampa Bay area. Milton came ashore at Siesta Key and cut power to nearly 600,000 Tampa Electric customers. Tampa Electric put 6,000 workers in the field and had essentially every customer restored within a week. Duke Energy Florida restored 95% of its customers within 72 hours of Helene’s Category 4 landfall, and 95% of Milton’s outages within 96 hours, mobilizing more than 27,000 workers across the season. Sit with that comparison. Florida absorbed two hurricanes in ten weeks and turned the lights back on in days. Venezuela lost an entire country for five days because nobody cleared the brush.
This illustrates what happens when politicians set the price of power and no one is left accountable for maintaining it. Venezuela froze electricity rates in 2002 and subsidized power near 100%. As Chatham House documented, while costs climbed, “revenue stagnated while subsidies ballooned… This strangled maintenance budgets.” Florida spent those same years hardening the grid instead. Tampa Electric now has more than half of its 12,000 miles of line underground and has cut momentary outages by 48%. FPL needed 10 days to restore power to 4.4 million customers after Irma in 2017; seven years later, it restored power to more than 2 million in 5.
So, it would never happen here, right? Wrong.
DSA’s national program, drafted this Spring, calls to “establish public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries.” A Democratic Socialist NY assemblymember has a live bill to forcibly replace a private utility with a state-owned corporation, and in March she explained the goal plainly: “We no longer want to waste our time on a futile effort to lower profits; we want to eliminate profits altogether.”
Milwaukee DSA organizers describe their plan as using “eminent domain to purchase all of the private energy utilities in the city.”
The DSA movement wants private investment in energy to stop existing altogether, and we’ve seen exactly what that results in: unreliable coverage, ballooning government spending, and life-threatening conditions for the people these governments are supposed to serve. Florida does things differently. When storms hit, we get homes and businesses back online in days. We are third in the nation in solar without a single state renewable mandate. Floridians pay about 14 cents per kilowatt-hour, while New Yorkers pay 24 cents and Californians pay nearly 32 cents.
Private innovation, a hardened grid, and an energy system built by people who answer for keeping it running. That’s what puts the lights back on after a hurricane and keeps the AC running in the Florida Summer. Let’s keep DSA hands off our grid.
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Zachary Colletti is the Executive Director of Conservatives for Clean Energy – Florida.
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