Electric Service in Sebastian, Florida

Florida Power & Light (FPL) provides electricity to every home and business in Sebastian, because the City of Sebastian has never run an electric utility of its own.

The utility serving Sebastian is investor-owned, not a city or cooperative system. Its company profile calls Florida Power & Light Company America's largest electric utility, with more than 6 million customer accounts and about 12 million people served, and names it a subsidiary of Juno Beach, Florida-based NextEra Energy, Inc. (FPL company profile).

The size of the Sebastian system was put on the record at a Sebastian City Council meeting in June 2021. FPL has more than 76 miles of power lines in Sebastian, with 40 percent already underground (Sebastian Daily, June 27, 2021). For Sebastian customers, rates, billing and outage response follow FPL's statewide tariffs and storm plans, and the Florida Public Service Commission in Tallahassee, not the Sebastian City Council, is the regulator. Last verified: October 11, 2026, on the FPL website.

A power outage in Sebastian is reported to FPL, not to City Hall, through the FPL Web Outage Reporting System or by phone at 1-800-4OUTAGE (1-800-468-8243), and tracked on the FPL Power Tracker map.

To report an outage, FPL points customers to its Web Outage Reporting System or the phone line 1-800-4OUTAGE (1-800-468-8243) (FPL Power Tracker FAQ). The same number takes streetlight reports, as does FPL.com/streetlight; FPL asks for the nearest address or the 11-digit number mounted on the pole, and warns that not all streetlights are maintained by FPL, so some fixes along Sebastian streets may fall to the city or a homeowners association (FPL Power Tracker FAQ).

Power Tracker is FPL's online, interactive outage map. Customers can enter a street address, city or ZIP code to view outage and restoration information, so typing Sebastian or 32958 zooms the map to the city (FPL Power Tracker FAQ). Each triangle icon opens a box with the outage report time, estimated time of restoration, number of customers affected, status and cause. The map does not track flickers or brief interruptions, and for safety it never displays a single street address; an icon marks the rough center of an outage that may span several streets in the Sebastian Highlands grid.

FPL updates the map approximately every 15 to 30 minutes, and an outage reported more than 15 minutes earlier that still does not appear should be checked in the Web Outage Reporting System (FPL Power Tracker FAQ). The FPL Storm Center adds the mobile route: text App to MyFPL (69375) to get the FPL Mobile App for outage information (FPL Storm Center). Vero News, writing for Indian River County readers on July 2, 2025, listed 1-800-4-OUTAGE, FPLmaps.com and the mobile app as the reporting and tracking channels (Vero News).

Sebastian's grid has two layers: main feeder lines on concrete poles along roads such as CR-512 (Sebastian Blvd), and neighborhood lines that ran on wooden poles behind houses until FPL began burying them.

FPL has recently installed more concrete poles along major roads such as CR-512 (Sebastian Blvd), Sebastian Daily reported from the June 2021 council presentation, and the main lines on concrete poles would remain overhead (Sebastian Daily). FPL's Storm Secure Underground Program manager told the council the remaining 60 percent of Sebastian lines that were still overhead was the focus.

The numbers were specific to Sebastian. FPL said there were 143 neighborhood power lines with more than 6,300 customers in Sebastian that it would approach in 2021 and 2022, chosen where outage data was worst. FPL also said the vast majority of outages in Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Matthew were caused by vegetation, that buried lines perform 80 percent better during significant storm events, and that construction would begin in January 2022 and run 12 to 18 months (Sebastian Daily).

Burial changed the look of Sebastian side yards. FPL said it would look for 5 out of 8 customers on a line to accept pad-mounted box transformers on easements of their properties in the Sebastian neighborhoods chosen for underground service.

By July 2025 FPL had hardened more than 2,000 poles in Indian River County and completed 167 neighborhood underground line projects, adding smart grid devices that reroute power around faults near Sebastian.

The Vero News report of July 2, 2025 gave the county totals: FPL crews had upgraded more than 2,000 power poles in Indian River County to reinforced wood, steel or concrete, and FPL counted 6,653 local customers served on underground lines and 95 miles of underground lines in the county (Vero News). The same report said Hurricane Milton in 2024 spawned at least six tornadoes in Indian River County and left some residents without power for days, the reason FPL itself says no grid is storm proof.

Tree trimming is the other half of the plan. In 2019 FPL said trees around main lines are trimmed every three years and trees near neighborhood lines every six years, and that by the end of 2019 it would have trimmed vegetation from 413 miles of power lines countywide and inspected 7,863 poles in Indian River County (Vero News, August 29, 2019).

Hurricane Irma in September 2017 is the most detailed local record of an FPL restoration in Sebastian. Sebastian Daily reported on September 12, 2017 that power had been restored to most residents living in Sebastian and Vero Lake Estates by noon that Tuesday, with FPL trucks seen on CR-512 and near Barber Street and Roseland Road, while Barefoot Bay residents in Micco lost power again as FPL fixed a main line (Sebastian Daily).

The Florida Public Service Commission sets FPL rates for Sebastian, and on November 20, 2025 it approved a four-year FPL rate settlement that raises base rates in 2026 and 2027.

The settlement is expected to lead to base-rate increases of $945 million in 2026 and $705 million in 2027, with more collected in 2028 and 2029 for solar and battery projects (WUSF, News Service of Florida, November 20, 2025). For a residential customer using 1,000 kilowatt hours a month in the traditional FPL territory, which includes Sebastian and the rest of Indian River County, the benchmark bill goes from $134.14 to $136.64 in 2026. Opponents said they expected to challenge the plan at the Florida Supreme Court.

The commission's power over Indian River County power was shown in 2018. On June 5, 2018 the Florida Public Service Commission voted 3-2 to approve the sale of the Vero electric system to Florida Power and Light and to let FPL charge Vero's 34,000 customers FPL rates (Vero News). The deal closed in December 2018, when Vero Beach Mayor Harry Howle and FPL chief executive Eric Silagy signed documents to transfer the city's power plant, electric utility assets and 35,000 customers to FPL in a $183 million deal (Vero News). Since that closing, former Vero electric customers have been on the same FPL rates as Sebastian and Roseland.

FPL runs four 74.5 megawatt solar energy centers on former citrus groves in southern and western Indian River County, none inside Sebastian city limits, that feed the same grid serving Sebastian homes.

FPL is capable of producing 298 megawatts with the four solar centers in Indian River County, enough to power 60,000 homes, an FPL spokesperson told Vero News in October 2022, with Turnpike and Orchard solar centers planned to lift the total to 447 megawatts (Vero News). Blue Cypress sits on 424 acres; Orange Blossom covers 607 acres in that account.

Orange Blossom shows the scale of these plants. The Indian River County Board of Commissioners approved it in 2019 at the northeast corner of Oslo Road and 122nd Avenue Southwest, on a former citrus grove about four miles west of Interstate 95, with an onsite substation and around 300,000 panels; FPL called it a $100 million project (Vero News, September 5, 2019). The approval cited 476 acres, a smaller figure than the 607 acres given once it was built.