The electricity provider for Orlando, Florida, and its customers could use relationship therapy as they venture together into an era of sunshine powering homes, cars and most everything else.

What the municipally owned Orlando Utilities Commission aims to do is swift, consequential and risk-taking in a region of the nation only now going full throttle to green energy. Within 16 years, OUC plans to jettison more than 90% of its tried-and-true ability to make electricity with generation plants that burn fossil fuels, mainly coal and natural gas, and will have erected solar panels on more than 10,000 acres, an expanse larger than Winter Park.

In that time, the utility's batteries for providing nighttime power will grow in capacity to as much as that in 35,000 electric cars.

It's difficult to overstate the enormity of the transformation, which is intended to help shrink fossil fuel carbon pollution that drives global warming, rising sea levels, desertification, supercharged wildfires and storms, spreading pathogens, species extinctions and more.

Already, however, Orlando's utility is struggling to enlist its customers in moves it insists are necessary to chart this new course.

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