VERO BEACH – Florida Power and Light neither wants nor needs to purchase Vero Beach’s antiquated power plant, the electric provider told four City Council members during private meetings recently.
FP&L also made it clear that it would take over all the customer service functions if it buys Vero electric, but said it cannot, as an investor-owned utility, purchase certain power assets of the city that are owned through the Florida Municipal Power Agency.
With goals of paying the city enough to clear its $58 million in bonds and give Vero customers FP&L retail rates, there still remain some questions to be answered.
First of all, Vero Beach would need to extricate itself from its 20-year, $2 billion- contract with the Orlando Utilities Commission.
Second, city leaders would be challenged to pare down operations in proportion to the reduced workload once portions of the utility have been sold.
For years, residents have complained about the big blue power plant taking up prime riverfront property on the northwest side of the 17th Street Causeway and it appears that the plant would go away if the electric utility were to be sold to FP&L.
Last week, in the presence of FP&L executives who did not refute her statements, Councilwoman Tracy Carroll said the electric giant would have no need for the city’s power generating plant and therefore no desire to purchase it.
That means the plant would need to be decommissioned, or shut down and rendered inoperable.
Vero Beach resident Jose Prieto and his family have been in the business of consulting for and dismantling industrial facilities for more than 60 years.
Prieto’s grandfather started the business in Cuba in 1948, mostly working on the design, construction and expansion of sugar refineries.
Taking apart the power plant and selling it off part and parcel, Prieto said, could be done in as little as nine months to one year, if the City of Vero Beach does all the prep work such as emptying the fuel tanks and cleaning the site first.
“If you had to do a site cleanup, you can get into some money, but they probably keep up with that on an on-going basis,” Prieto said. “It may offset the value of a long-term lease on the property if you have to clean it up. That plant’s been around a while, you’d have to do an environmental study and an asbestos survey as part of the decommissioning process.”
As far as the cost goes, if the scrap metal market at the time is favorable and the contractor in charge of the project has good contacts, the net cost could be minimized.
“There is value in the power plant, maybe not enough to totally offset the cost of the decommissioning, but there’s value there,” Prieto said. “The trickiest part is trying to maximize the return. If you can do that, generally speaking, the owner can walk away with little or no cost.”
Fort Pierce Utility Authority decommissioned its power plant in 2008 but has announced no final plans for the 8-acre site.
The project took 15 months with a net cost of $200,000, which, according to FPUA Spokesperson Levette Dixon, “included the removal of some hazardous waste we encountered during the demolition activities.”
So who would buy the parts of Vero’s plant and where would they go?
“There are potential buyers all around the world,” Prieto said. “The boilers could go one place, the scrap steel, copper, stainless steel things like that could go somewhere else. The ideal situation would be to have enough notice to find buyers for the equipment and anything that doesn’t sell in a given period of time could then be scrapped. The market right now is pretty strong for the scrap metals.”
But the big-ticket items would be the five General Electric power generators, especially the three more recent purchases that are more fuel-efficient.
“You’d want to target countries where the oil is cheap and they need the power,” Prieto said.
An environmental consultant would work with the City of Vero Beach to comply with all regulatory requirements. After the nearly 20-acre site is cleared and cleaned up, there would be a multitude of potential uses — many of which could produce income for the city.
Some ideas that have surfaced are a resort and conference complex, restaurants and shops or possibly an outdoor entertainment venue with boat slips.
Uses that would give the city recreational and aesthetic benefits but which would not be direct money-makers would be turning the site into a park, greenway or nature preserve area.
