Contributed by Tom Beard | Chairman and CEO, Palmer Electric
Florida doesn’t generate enough electricity to meet its own needs. Despite ranking as the nation’s second-largest producer, the state is also one of its largest electricity consumers. It draws some additional power from the regional grid to help cover the gap. Though that reliance has been shrinking, not growing, over the past decade, that gap is becoming more consequential. U.S. electricity demand is projected to grow 21% by 2030 and 39% by 2035, driven by data center activity, industrial expansion, and electrification. The U.S. currently has only about 26 gigawatts of excess generating capacity above minimum reliability requirements, roughly 3% of total capacity nationally.
There’s plenty written about that growth from the generation and transmission side: new gas capacity, new solar interconnections, grid modernization timelines. As electrical contractors, we want to talk about the other end of it. We are out in homes and businesses every day, in a state where the fuel mix and the weather both put reliability front and center. Storm season runs June through November here, and it shapes how people think about their power supply well before the first named storm shows up.
Natural gas fueled about 75% of Florida’s total electricity net generation in 2024, a level of fuel concentration that leaves the state’s grid exposed when supply is disrupted. At the same time, Florida sees more hurricane landfalls than any other state, and outages during storm season aren’t hypothetical; they’re annual.
Utility-scale solar is expanding to help meet rising demand. Wind and solar together generated a record 17% of U.S. electricity in 2025, rising to 19% once small-scale solar is included. Florida ranked third nationally in solar generation that year, trailing only California and Texas.
The residential stakes are higher in Florida than almost anywhere else in the country. Florida’s residential sector consumes 54% of all electricity used in the state, the largest share of any state in the nation, reflecting the fact that nearly all Florida households use air conditioning and about 9 in 10 use electricity as their primary source for home heating.
When a hurricane knocks out distribution infrastructure, that concentration of residential load means the reliability question isn’t abstract for a huge share of the state’s population; it’s a question of whether the lights, the refrigerator, and the medical equipment in someone’s home stay on.
That’s the piece utilities and grid planners don’t always see directly: how much resilience customers are building at the property level, independent of what’s happening on the grid side. Palmer Electric has installed electrical systems across Central Florida since 1951, and the pattern over the past several years has been consistent.
“Backup generators used to be something a customer thought about after losing power for a few days during a hurricane. Now it’s something people plan for before storm season even starts.”
– Tom Beard, CEO of Palmer Electric
We’ve also seen steady growth in EV charger installs, both at homes and on the commercial side, something that barely came up a decade ago. What ties it together is that more customers want some control over their own power reliability instead of just hoping the grid holds up.
That shift, from reactive to planned, is a demand signal that doesn’t show up cleanly in utility load forecasts, but it’s real and compounding alongside broader grid-level demand growth.
Florida is a useful case for a broader point. In fast-growing, storm-exposed states, distributed backup generation and EV charging are rising right alongside utility-scale demand, and both are drawing on the same tight capacity margin.
Planners in similarly exposed regions should be tracking property-level resilience decisions as part of the demand growth story itself, and right now, they’re moving faster than most top-down forecasts capture.
Tom Beard is the chairman and CEO of Palmer Electric Company, Central Florida’s premier electrical services provider since 1951. Under his leadership, which has spanned more than five decades, Palmer Electric has continued to grow beyond traditional electrical work, expanding into the installation, maintenance, and monitoring of security and fire alarm systems. Known for reliability, innovation, and expertise, Palmer Electric is the most trusted company for electrical, fire, and security services across Orlando and Central Florida.
