FPL Group, Inc. Q1 2010 Earnings Call Transcript

The three facilities in total will add roughly $700 million to our rate base and be recovered through the environmental clause. Also in April, FPL announced that we signed a definitive agreement with the US Department of Energy to receive $200 million in Recovery Act Funding, which FPL will use to further our Energy Smart Florida initiative. Energy Smart Florida represents an expected overall investment of about $800 million. We are investing in Smart Grid technologies as part of our commitment to building a stronger, smarter, cleaner and more efficient electrical infrastructure.

Energy Smart Florida is designed to help keep service reliability high over the long term and get customers more information to manage their energy usage. The deployment of state-of-the-art Smart Grid technologies including smart meters which should improve the service we provide our 4.5 million customers and provide them with changeable benefits today while laying out the foundation for a host of future benefits. Although the weak wind resource negatively affected first quarter results of NextEra Energy Resources, the operational performance of our fleet was strong.

The forced outage rate for our fossil fleet was best-in-class for the industry based on available data and in addition the forced outage rate for our wind fleet was one of our best ever and continues to lead the industry.

Finally during the quarter, our Point Beach nuclear facility completed the refueling outage. In addition, we continued to pursue development opportunities in Canada, and a couple of weeks ago, we were awarded approximately 148 megawatts of wind projects in Ontario, Canada, as part of the province's feed-in tariff program.

We were excited that one of the projects we were awarded was the largest projects selected and that in total we were awarded approximately 12% of the total land-based wind projects. Separately, in the last couple of weeks, we commissioned 99 megawatts of new wind in the US and we have approximately 140 megawatts either under construction or approved for construction.

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