Gainesville Regional Utilities eyes UF power contract gainesville.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from gainesville.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
At a neighborhood meeting last November, representatives from Origis Energy and Gainesville Regional Utilities sought to allay concerns about a proposed solar farm in the Sand Bluff neighborhood near Archer.
At that November meeting, a few local residents charged that the site selection had been racist: The county was once again conspiring to dump a dirty industry onto a Black and brown neighborhood (in this case a proud, multi-generational farming community).
Origis Energy, the solar contracting company that selected the Sand Bluff site, vigorously pushed back against that view. They noted that the site had been chosen for practical reasons.
Gainesville Regional Utilities is on a misguided mission to promote natural gas. On its website you can read what at first sounds like a joke: “With natural gas, water heats up twice as fast and stays hot longer! Clothing dries more quickly and with fewer wrinkles! Food tastes better when prepared using natural gas!” This would be funny if it weren’t so costly and wrong.
So desperate is GRU to push natural gas over electricity that our local utility company is now offering rebates (up to $1,600 per location!) to convert electric hot water heaters, furnaces, ranges and dryers to natural gas.