Electric Service — Sebastian, Florida

Electricity in Sebastian comes from Florida Power & Light, known as FPL. The City of Sebastian does not own an electric utility, so homes and businesses across the city take service from FPL's statewide grid. When FPL presented its underground line program to the Sebastian City Council in June 2021, Sebastian Daily reported that FPL has more than 76 miles of power lines in Sebastian, with 40 percent already underground.

FPL is a large, investor-owned utility rather than a city or cooperative system. Its company profile describes Florida Power & Light Company as America's largest electric utility, serving more than 6 million customer accounts, about 12 million people, and identifies it as a subsidiary of Juno Beach, Florida-based NextEra Energy, Inc. For Sebastian customers, that means rates, billing and outage response follow FPL's statewide tariffs and storm programs, with the Florida Public Service Commission as the state regulator, as it was in the 2018 Vero Beach sale described below.

Sebastian's grid has two layers. Main feeder lines run on concrete poles along major roads; Sebastian Daily reported in 2021 that FPL had recently installed more concrete poles along major roads such as CR-512 (Sebastian Blvd), with new equipment on the main lines to withstand high winds. Neighborhood lines, the ones running behind houses in Sebastian's residential grid, were mostly on wooden poles. FPL told the council that the main lines would stay overhead while the neighborhood lines were the target for burial.

That burial work is FPL's Storm Secure Underground Program. At the June 2021 presentation, FPL said there were 143 neighborhood power lines with more than 6,300 customers in Sebastian that it would approach in 2021 and 2022, chosen where data showed the most storm and vegetation outages. FPL said the vast majority of outages during Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Matthew in the Sebastian area were caused by vegetation, and that the project would need pad-mounted transformer boxes on easements, seeking 5 out of 8 customers on a line to host them. FPL also told Sebastian officials that underground lines perform 80 percent better during significant storm events and reduce day-to-day interruptions caused by trees.

The program has spread across the county. A Vero News report from July 2, 2025 said FPL crews had upgraded more than 2,000 power poles in Indian River County to reinforced wood, steel or concrete and installed smart grid devices that reroute power around faults. FPL told the paper it had completed 167 neighborhood underground line projects in Indian River County, serving 6,653 local customers on underground lines, and that it had 95 miles of underground lines in the county.

FPL also pointed to the limits of hardening. The same 2025 report noted that Hurricane Milton in 2024 spawned at least six tornadoes in Indian River County, leaving some residents without power for days. Outages in Sebastian are reported to FPL rather than to the city; Vero News listed 1-800-4-OUTAGE, FPLmaps.com and the FPL mobile app as the reporting and tracking channels for Indian River County customers.

Tree trimming is the other half of the strategy. In a 2019 presentation to the Vero Beach City Council, reported by Vero News, FPL said trees around main lines are trimmed every three years and trees near neighborhood lines every six years, and that by the end of 2019 it would have trimmed vegetation from 413 miles of power lines countywide and inspected 7,863 poles in Indian River County. The same report described FPL as serving more than 5 million customer accounts in 35 counties at the time, a statewide service area that includes Sebastian.

Some of the power on FPL's grid near Sebastian now comes from former citrus land in Indian River County. Vero News reported in October 2022 that FPL opened two solar energy centers in the county in 2018, one in 2021 and another in 2022: Indian River Solar Energy Center (74.5 megawatts, 2018), Blue Cypress Solar Energy Center (2018), Orange Blossom Solar Energy Center (2021) and Grove Solar Energy Center (2022). FPL said the four centers then operating in Indian River County could produce 298 megawatts, enough for 60,000 homes, with Turnpike and Orchard solar centers planned to raise the total to 447 megawatts.

The Orange Blossom site illustrates the scale. According to Vero News, the Indian River County Board of Commissioners approved the 476-acre center at the northeast corner of Oslo Road and 122nd Avenue Southwest in 2019, a 74.5 megawatt facility with about 300,000 panels and its own substation, described by FPL as a $100 million project. None of these plants is inside Sebastian city limits; they feed the same FPL grid that serves Sebastian households.

Until 2018, the City of Vero Beach ran its own municipal electric utility alongside FPL in Indian River County. On June 5, 2018, Vero News reported, the Florida Public Service Commission voted 3-2 to approve the sale of the Vero electric system to Florida Power and Light and to let FPL charge Vero's 34,000 customers FPL rates. The sale closed in December 2018, when, according to Vero News, Vero Beach Mayor Harry Howle and FPL chief executive Eric Silagy signed documents to transfer the city's power plant, electric utility assets and 35,000 customers to FPL in a $183 million deal.

Since that closing, former Vero electric customers in Vero Beach and nearby Indian River County communities have been on FPL, the same utility that serves Sebastian. The 2018 commission vote is also the clearest local example of the Florida Public Service Commission's role: rates and major transactions for FPL customers in Sebastian are decided in Tallahassee by the state regulator, not by the Sebastian City Council.