FMPA Fails To Get Lowest Rates With Byzantine Bidding Process

By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent

What Happened: The Florida Municipal Power Agency (FMPA) recently completed a bid on a 223.5 MW project for its member municipal utilities that sources tell SolarWakeup did not arrive at the lowest possible price.

  • Published reports peg the price at less than 4 cents per kWh, and sources familiar with the bidding process say there was at least one bid that came in lower.
  • The decision came at the end of what can at least be called an odd, byzantine bidding process where a closed set of companies were chosen to submit bids.
    • FPMA

    Interestingly, Miami-based developers with solar experience in Florida were not chosen to bid on the FMPA project.

    SolarWakeup’s View:  When you join a buying cooperative, you should get the lowest price on whatever you’re buying, right? Otherwise, what’s the point in joining forces to make purchases?

    So what to do with the Florida Municipal Power Agency (FMPA), a collaboration of 12 municipal electrical agencies that recently awarded a 223.5 MW project group to NextEra Energy in the form of three 74.5-megawatt sites? A closed group of seven companies (listed below) bid on the project, and the price came in at less than 4 cents per kilowatt-hour. But at least one source close to the project said their bid had come in lower – so should the municipal utilities that make up the FPMA be upset?

    The answer is a definite maybe.

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    FPMA reports they called and requested bids from the following seven companies:

  • NextEra
  • Duke Energy Florida (DEF) (unregulated solar affiliate)
  • Tampa Electric Company (TECO) (unregulated solar affiliate)
  • GroSolar (Global Resource Options, Inc.) an EDF Renewable Energy Company
  • Invenergy Solar Development North America (Invenergy)
  • Eagle Solar Group, LLC in conjunction with Holloway Solar Farm LLC
  • Soltage, LLC in conjunction with ESA Renewables

    • FMPA says it negotiated with the top two bidders Invenergy and NextEra, and NextEra won the bid.

    Except….that’s not the story we are hearing. And we also find it curious that Origis, which has done multiple large-scale solar projects of almost exactly this size, was not included, nor was sPower, whose former majority shareholder was based in Miami.

    In short, the odd way the bidding occurred, combined with the reports that it wasn’t the lowest price, should inspire FMPA members to at least ask questions. It sure seems like a strange use of the co-op power to us.

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