Activists Occupy Downtown West Palm Beach Billboard protesting Florida Power and Light

West Palm Beach, May 14 — This morn­ing local activists from Project Aware­ness and Ever­glades Earth First! hung ban­ners and locked them­selves to a down­town rooftop bill­board to call for a sus­tain­able future for west­ern Palm Beach Coun­ty. They oppose FPL’s pro­posed West Coun­ty Ener­gy Cen­ter, cit­ing its con­tri­bu­tion to glob­al warm­ing, Ever­glades pol­lu­tion, and overde­vel­op­ment; and the Callery-Judge “Town Devel­op­ment,” which would jump­start urban sprawl in the Lox­a­hatch­ee area. Their mes­sages high­light the enor­mous water con­sump­tion cllowances already approved for each project, and pro­mote pub­lic par­tic­i­pa­tion in two forums ñ tomorrow’s 2pm coun­ty com­mis­sion meet­ing and the FPL’s Share­hold­ers meet­ing to take place at FPL’s Juno Beach head­quar­ters on May 25.

West Palm billboard actionWest Palm Beach, May 14 — This morn­ing local activists from Project Aware­ness and Ever­glades Earth First! hung ban­ners and locked them­selves to a down­town rooftop bill­board to call for a sus­tain­able future for west­ern Palm Beach Coun­ty. They oppose FPL’s pro­posed West Coun­ty Ener­gy Cen­ter, cit­ing its con­tri­bu­tion to glob­al warm­ing, Ever­glades pol­lu­tion, and overde­vel­op­ment; and the Callery-Judge “Town Devel­op­ment,” which would jump­start urban sprawl in the Lox­a­hatch­ee area. Their mes­sages high­light the enor­mous water con­sump­tion cllowances already approved for each project, and pro­mote pub­lic par­tic­i­pa­tion in two forums ñ tomorrow’s 2pm coun­ty com­mis­sion meet­ing and the FPL’s Share­hold­ers meet­ing to take place at FPL’s Juno Beach head­quar­ters on May 25.

Their col­or­ful ban­ners showed an alli­ga­tor chomp­ing a pow­er plant and read:

“Got Water? They would: FPL’s West Coun­ty Plant ->18 mil­lion gal­lons a Day;

“Callery-Judge Town -> 5 mil­lion gal­lons a day. Keep it Rur­al, Keep it Wild. No new FPL Plant”

For over a year envi­ron­men­tal groups have been fight­ing the West Coun­ty Ener­gy Cen­ter (WCEC), a nat­ur­al gas plant that FPL hopes to con­struct 1000 feet away from the Arthur R. Mar­shall Nation­al Wildlife Refuge in Lox­a­hatch­ee. As the alter­na­tive to fos­sil fuel plans, activists are pro­mot­ing ener­gy effi­cien­cy & renew­able ener­gy, which FPL claims is imprac­ti­cal, despite the Amer­i­can Coun­cil for Ener­gy Efficiency’s recent report on the poten­tial for effi­cien­cy and renew­able sources to meet Florida’s ener­gy demands.

“When it comes to renew­able ener­gy, the sci­ence has been there for years,” says local activist & physi­cist Lynne Purvis. “Why does FPL con­tin­ue to use old, dirty tech­nolo­gies? The answer can only be greed.”

The cur­rent drought and water short­ages spawn fur­ther con­cerns about FPL’s pro­posed WCEC water require­ments of 18 mil­lion gal­lons a day and the unknown water con­sump­tion of the hun­dreds of thou­sands of units of devel­op­ment enabled by the project, includ­ing Callery-Judge’s 5 mil­lion gal­lons a day.

“These projects are direct threats to Ever­glades Restora­tion,” declared Ever­glades Earth First! mem­ber Peter Shultz. “What we need is con­ser­va­tion, not more con­struc­tion.”