Florida Power & Light was charging customers a voluntary $9.75 fee on top of their power bills for something called The Sunshine Energy program.

• The parties were supposed to develop an extra 150 kilowatts of solar energy for every 10,000 residential customers who signed on to the Sunshine Energy program.

Sounds nice. Alternative energy at last.

• But a Public Service Commission report last month said only 24 percent of the money collected from more than 38,000 households paid for actual energy. The rest funded marketing and administration costs to promote the program.

The failure of a program was operated with Green Mountain Energy as a partner. Their senior vice president, Paul Markovich, had a telling quote about the debacle.

• “These programs don’t grow themselves. Customers don’t wake up one day and say, ‘I’m going to sign up for green power.’”

Actually they do. The FPL customers were paying a $9.75 voluntary fee. It gets better at Green Mountain’s own website.

• “Sunshine Energy has been ranked among the ‘Top Ten’ utility green power programs in U.S. for four consecutive years, as ranked by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) of the U.S. Department of Energy. There are more than 800 utility green power programs nationwide.

Yes that’s right, this program that misappropriated more than 76% of its funds was better than the other 90% of green power programs nationwide according to NREL.

Something is wrong here folks. The nuclear power plant/ANWR drilling combo sounds pretty good right about now.