“The whole energy policy dynamic in Florida has alienated the public interest,” said E. Leon Jacobs Jr., a former chairman of the Florida Public Service Commission who was elected president of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, a nonprofit environmental organization, in September 2020. “There absolutely were issues and challenges that should have been made in regard to that transmission line.”The project will be funded in part by a $692 million increase in customers’ rates in 2022 — part of $4.9 billion in cumulative rate increases over four years that the Public Service Commission approved long after Mr. Jacobs’s departure. Because of the line’s voltage, the p …
