History of Tallahassee's City-Owned Electric Utility

Tallahassee began generating its own electricity in 1902, according to the City's April 2026 Ten-Year Site Plan.

The 2026 Ten-Year Site Plan, filed with the Florida Public Service Commission, opens with a short profile. The City of Tallahassee owns, operates and maintains an electric generation, transmission and distribution system that supplies power in and around its corporate limits. The City was incorporated in 1825 and has operated since 1919 under the same charter. It began generating its power requirements in 1902, and the Electric Utility now serves approximately 124,000 customers within a 221 square mile service territory.

The utility is run from the Electric and Gas Utility offices at 2602 Jackson Bluff Road, the address on every page of the site plan, and the City of Tallahassee Utilities customer office is at 435 N. Macomb St., phone 850-891-4968, on its power restoration page. The same department also runs water, natural gas and waste service under the City of Tallahassee Utilities name.

The Tallahassee system grew around two natural gas plants, Purdom at St. Marks from 1952 and Hopkins on Geddie Road from 1970, later joined by a distributed plant in 2018 and two solar farms.

The 2026 site plan says the Sam O. Purdom Generating Station in the City of St. Marks has been in operation since 1952, the Arvah B. Hopkins Generating Station on Geddie Road west of the City has been in commercial operation since 1970, and the Substation 12 Distributed Generation Facility on Medical Drive has run since 2018. The City buys 100 percent of the output of two solar farms on City property next to Tallahassee International Airport.

Source: City of Tallahassee 2026 Ten-Year Site Plan, whose Schedule 1 places the Hopkins and Substation 12 units in Leon County and Purdom in Wakulla County, and which puts total net summer capability at 737 MW and winter capability at 795 MW as of December 31, 2025. The City's own plant pages, last checked October 18, 2026, give older figures: the Hopkins page says the plant was built in 1971, was expanded to more than double its size in 1977, and can generate up to 504 megawatts, while the Purdom page lists 242 MW in its summary and up to 301 megawatts in its text.

A small hydro plant came and went. The City of Tallahassee took over the Jackson Bluff dam powerhouse on the Ochlockonee River at Lake Talquin under a federal license issued on July 14, 1982, with units installed in 1986, the FERC environmental assessment records. The City told the Florida PSC in 2019 that the plant averaged about 17 GWh a year, less than 1 percent of its energy needs, and that FERC accepted the surrender of its license on March 13, 2019.

The City of Tallahassee and Talquin Electric Cooperative divide the Tallahassee area under a territorial agreement, and each serves some of the other's customers.

The 2026 site plan explains that firm retail service for City customers on the Talquin system is bought from and provided by Talquin, and that the City sells and provides service to Talquin customers on the City system. Reciprocal service continues for all Talquin customers now on the City system, and payments and any transfer of customers and facilities are governed by the territorial agreement between the two. The City's system also connects to Duke Energy Florida at four points and to Georgia Power at 230 kV.

Talquin lists its own offices on its About Us page: headquarters at 1640 West Jefferson Street in Quincy, plus offices in Bradfordville (6724 Thomasville Road, Tallahassee), Lake Jackson (4808 Portal Drive, Tallahassee), Crawfordville and Hosford.

How much a city utility may send to general government has been debated in the Legislature. In 2023, CS/HB 1331, titled Municipal Utilities, would have established limits on utility revenue transfers for municipal utilities and changed rules on rates charged to water and sewer customers outside city limits. The bill died in the House Commerce Committee on May 5, 2023, so Tallahassee's arrangement continued unchanged by that bill.

The City's Electric Utility files a Ten-Year Site Plan with the Florida Public Service Commission each year, and the 2026 plan for Tallahassee schedules no new units and no retirements through 2035.

The key takeaways of the 2026 Tallahassee plan state that the load forecast for 2026 to 2035 does not show a need for more firm capacity to meet demand and reserve margin. Summer peaks have not risen despite community growth, which the City credits to energy efficiency and demand side measures, but severe winter storms have produced loads close to records. The City wrote that adding energy storage could reduce costs, add short-duration capacity, lower risk and cut dependence on natural gas.

The same filing treats the Tallahassee airport solar conservatively. The City found that about 50 percent of the solar farms' rated capacity was available on average during summer peak hours, but it counts only 20 percent as firm capacity. In its answers to PSC staff, the City noted that modern data centers could demand as much power as its whole 737 MW summer capacity, and that such growth in the service territory would require detailed planning to protect reliability and affordability for its customers.

The plan sits under a local goal. Through the Clean Energy Resolution, 19-R-04, the Tallahassee City Commission set a target of 100 percent net, clean renewable energy no later than 2050, the City's Clean Energy Plan page states, and the plan's about page sets a 2035 milestone for City operations that includes shifting StarMetro fixed-route buses to electric.

The PSC review is not a formality for Tallahassee. The City's 2019 response to PSC staff questions shows the commission asking for the status and motive of the hydro license surrender, and the City answering that the plant's value did not justify its cost.

The City of Tallahassee repairs the service wire, the poles and the meter, while the homeowner's licensed electrician repairs the meter box, mast and weather head.

The City's power restoration guide sets out the steps. Homeowners are responsible for electrical equipment attached to the house; the City is not authorized to repair privately owned equipment. If customer equipment is damaged or pulled loose, a licensed electrician must make the repairs and pull a permit with Growth Management, and once inspections pass, the owner calls City of Tallahassee Growth Management at 850-891-1800 so the City can restore power.

When a tree pulls the weather head off a house, the same guide says, a City crew usually removes the meter or rolls the service wire back to the pole, then returns to reconnect after the electrician's work is inspected. Outages are reported at 850-891-4968, through the DigiTally app's Electric Outage tab, or at Talgov.com/Outage, and the City notes that in most outages it is not known exactly when power will return to an individual home.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, against the City's 2026 Ten-Year Site Plan and its 2019 PSC data response, the FERC Jackson Bluff assessment, the City's Hopkins, Purdom and power restoration pages, the Florida Senate record for HB 1331, the Clean Energy Plan pages and Talquin Electric's office list.