Unplugging From Duke Energy?? -- Two Florida Cities Better Charge Up As Duke Sure Won't Go Quietly...

If St. Petersburg or Clearwater actually yank the plug on Duke Energy and try to run their own municipal utilities, they’d better start fundraising for lawyers — and for really heavy extension cords labeled “Legal Fees.” 

Winter Park’s city manager, Randy Knight, who’s been through the divorce dance before, warned straight-faced: “I would tell them to expect a big fight.” 

That’s the polite way to say: expect lawsuits, scorched press releases, ballot battles and a 70-page manual from the Edison Electric Institute that reads like a litigant’s cookbook!

Duke Energy will fight like an estranged ex who's mantra is "If I can't have you; no one will!"

Winter Park’s romance with public power began in 2005 when voters approved the split from Progress Energy (which later merged with Duke). Back then the investor-owned utility dangled a headline number — an estimated price tag of $106 million — and the city braced for a horror film of invoices. 

After protracted legal wrangling they paid roughly $43 million for poles and lines, and then roughly $30 million in legal bills. 

The punchline? 

Voters approved the move by 69%, and today Winter Park’s utility bills are about 28% lower than Duke’s. 

The city has used utility profits to bury 81% of its power lines, which — according to Knight — meant “when the last hurricanes came through last year, all the utilities around us had outages for a few days. We had everybody back up the same day the storm left the city.” 

That’s the kind of comeback any mayor would post on social media.

Still, Knight remembers the PR hits. “From a public relations standpoint, they will be going around the community telling everybody they (the city) don't know what they're doing,” he said. “They've never run an electric utility.” 

He joked that 'opponents' (Duke) painted a doomsday picture of “five guys in a pickup truck trying to restore power.” 

Although that image makes for great late-night TV, Winter Park’s positive results from the 'break-up' suggests a different reality — and a positive one that is, if you can stomach the upfront drama and the legal tab.

Enter Clearwater and St. Pete, both eyeballing independence as their contracts with Duke approach expiration. 

Clearwater’s council voted to study creating a municipal utility after a NewGen Strategies and Solutions analysis suggested bills could be up to 18% lower than Duke Energy’s. 

Residents are angry at Duke Energy and are not shy about voicing it. 

Shane Marr told council members, “Duke has fleeced the Clearwater community for many decades.” 

Councilman Ryan Cotton pointed to Winter Park’s undergrounding example: “If we look at Winter Park, your city's going to be able to reinvest into itself,” Cotton said, noting the potential for long-term reinvestment tied to lower rates.

Duke, naturally, is flexing its emergency-response résumé. 

Spokeswoman Ana Gibbs touted mutual-aid muscle: “During Milton, Helene, and Debbie, Duke Energy was able to bring in 27,000 resources from across the country. That means crews came in from Colorado, California, and even Canada, and we were able to restore more than 2 million customer outages.” 

She also emphasized grid upgrades: “our advanced self-healing technology was able to reroute power and avoid more than 325 million minutes of outages.” 

Those are headlines that make for reassuring commercials during hurricane season. 

Duke’s study claims a Clearwater transition could cost up to $1 billion — a number that doubles as both warning and bargaining chip.

Not every municipal utility swears by the switch. 

Vero Beach voters once sold their debt-heavy municipal utility to Florida Power & Light and saw bills fall; other cities keep their public systems humming just fine (Jacksonville, Orlando, Gainesville, Lakeland and Bartow among them). 

Political reality bites, too: St. Petersburg Council member Corey Givens Jr. admitted the pain is real — “$450 was my bill yesterday, the highest bill that I have ever received. And I was disgusted because I felt what my constituents are feeling,” he said — even as Mayor Ken Welch has discussed a possible new decade-long deal with the company.

The takeaway for Pinellas: municipal utility ambitions may promise cheaper bills and prettier streets without poles, but they also promise protracted litigation, lobbying fights, and expensive consultants who bill by the hour and deliver spreadsheets that make your eyes water. 

If Clearwater or St. Pete want to go rogue, they’ll need grit, voters, and a contingency plan — ideally one with both buried lines and a buried legal budget. 

At the end of the day, switching from Duke is less “flip the switch” and more “flip open the litigation folders!”

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