Solar With a Florida Municipal Utility or Electric Co-op

The Commission publishes electric tariffs for the investor-owned utilities: Florida Power & Light Company, Duke Energy Florida, Tampa Electric Company, and Florida Public Utilities Company.⁴ If your bill comes from one of those, the statewide rule governs you and net metering in Florida describes your terms.

If your bill comes from a city, a utilities commission, or an electric cooperative — names like Orlando Utilities Commission, JEA, Lakeland Electric, Gainesville Regional Utilities, Kissimmee Utility Authority, Ocala Electric, Clay Electric, or Withlacoochee River Electric — you are in a different regime.

The Commission's rule on interconnection and metering of customer-owned renewable generation states plainly that it applies to all investor-owned utilities.³ The statutory definition of a public utility excludes municipal utilities and rural electric cooperatives.²

So the specific protections homeowners often assume are universal — no application fee for the smallest tier, no liability insurance requirement for the smallest tier, a disconnect-switch exemption for inverter-based systems, a 30-day execution deadline, credits paid out annually at an as-available rate — are rule provisions that bind investor-owned utilities.³ Your municipal utility or co-op may match them, exceed them, or not.

Municipal utilities and cooperatives are not unregulated. Florida Statutes require each municipal electric utility and each rural electric cooperative that sells electricity at retail to develop a standardized interconnection agreement and net metering program for customer-owned renewable generation, with each governing authority establishing requirements for expedited interconnection and net metering.¹

The same law requires each of them to file a report with the Commission by April 1 each year detailing customer participation, including the number and total capacity of interconnected generating systems and the total energy net metered in the previous year.¹

Separately, larger municipal utilities and cooperatives — those whose annual retail sales as of July 1, 1993 exceeded 2,000 gigawatt hours — must continuously offer a purchase contract to renewable energy producers based on the utility's full avoided costs as determined by its own governing body, with a contract term of at least ten years.¹

Two Florida municipal utilities show how differently a governing board can answer the same statutory requirement.

• Orlando Utilities Commission's TruNet program changed effective July 1, 2025. Applications completed and paid by June 30, 2025 keep the full retail rate for excess energy through June 30, 2045; later applications are credited at the Community Solar Energy Rate through June 30, 2030 and then the Retail Levelized Fuel Rate, with a temporary full retail grace period OUC gives as running through October 31, 2026.^5,6
• JEA credits exported energy at its fuel rate rather than the retail rate, carries dollar credit balances through the calendar year, and issues an IRS Form 1099-MISC for credits paid.⁷

Neither of those designs is what a homeowner would infer from generic Florida solar advice. The utility-specific detail is in going solar as an OUC customer and going solar as a JEA customer.

Whichever municipal utility or cooperative serves you, ask for these by name, in writing, before you sign an installation contract:

• The current interconnection requirements or standard interconnection agreement, including tier thresholds, application fees, insurance requirements and disconnect-switch rules.
• The rate schedule or rider that governs credit for exported energy, with its sheet number and effective date.
• A plain answer to what the export credit is worth per kWh today, and for how long that value is guaranteed.
• Whether any grandfathering applies, what triggers it, when it expires, and whether it attaches to the system or the customer.
• Whether the utility limits how large a system can be relative to your service capacity or annual usage.
• Whether the utility has any distinct rules for battery storage.
• The date the governing board last changed these terms, and whether any change is currently under consideration.

Board agendas, meeting minutes and customer notices are public. If a term matters to your economics, get the document — not a summary of it from someone selling you panels.

Florida has dozens of municipal electric utilities and electric cooperatives, each with its own board and its own documents. We are not going to publish a page per utility that recycles the same framework with a different logo, and we will not summarize a utility's terms we have not read in its own filed documents.

Where we have read the primary documents — OUC and JEA today — we publish specifics. Where we have not, this page gives you the framework and the exact questions that get you the answer from the only authority that counts: your utility.