ORANGE PARK – Rep. Bobby Payne has served in the Florida House of Representatives since 2016, and his term limit will end in seven months.

But don’t expect the Republican to disappear, especially as he believes the nation’s energy policy is in disarray.

Payne said energy was his most passionate project during the last legislative session. He said that until politicians listen to energy experts and engineers, the nation’s grid will be constantly at risk.

“I have an electric utility background,” he said. “I feel like we need to do more in the state to look at our energy policies. I started probably six, eight months ago working on energy policy in the state, knowing that 76% of our energy in the state provides energy opportunities from natural gas. What happens if one of those five pipelines, or one of those three major pipelines we will all share, goes down? It would not only affect businesses but cost us billions of dollars.

“I started looking at our other alternatives for fuel options and flexibility. We know that solar is very, very vibrant and very, very public. There’s a lot of solar opportunities. We see some wind energy opportunities throughout the nation in Florida, but it doesn’t work. You need 6.5 mph just to turn a wind turbine and 49 mph sustained wind.”

As Florida continues to grow, so will the state’s energy grid demands. Clay County, for example, grew by 2½% last year, according to the U.S. Census.

What are the solutions?

“We tasked the Public Service Commission to look into other fuel opportunities to interview companies for the state,” Payne said. “It was a passion of mine to start that this year. I developed a spreadsheet with 23 items that we needed to discuss. We narrowed it down to a number of workable small modular reactors and hydrogen fuel technology. We’re building technology that we’ll use as an alternative fuel.”