The Sunshine State of Florida is starting to live up to its name on the energy front. Today Florida Power & Light, the American state's biggest utility, started construction on what it says will be the first utility-scale solar investment in the state - and the second-largest of its kind in the country when it is fully turned on in 2010.

The facility, which is expected to enter service in 2010, will combine solar-thermal with a combined-cycle natural gas-fired power plant to use less fossil fuel when heat from the sun is available to produce steam needed to generate electricity.

It will consist of about 180,000 mirrors over roughly 500 acres at FPL's existing 3,657 MW Martin natural gas/oil-fired power station in Martin County. Martin County is about 100 miles north of Miami.

FPL said the $476 million solar-thermal station should provide enough power to serve about 11,000 homes, while preventing the emissions of more than 2.75 million tons of greenhouse gases, which is the equivalent of removing more than 18,700 cars from the road every year for the life of the project, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Projects like this will ''not only do good things for the environment, but drive costs of renewable power down,'' said Lew Hay, chairman and CEO of FPL. He explained that the innovative solar-natural gas hybrid system made economic sense since the turbines can still be put to work even when the sun isn't shining - but pulling it off required ''a fair amount of engineering.''

Another challenge, he added, was ''building it in such a way that it could withstand winds of a tropical storm or hurricane.'' The plant is the first of three solar facilities that FPL is constructing in Florida, which the utility says will make the state the second-largest solar energy producer in the US. California is currently the largest.

The Martin solar-thermal facility is the largest of the three, for a combined total of 110 MW. The other two projects are at NASA's Kennedy Space Center and in Desoto County. FPL already operates the 310 MW Solar Electric Generating System in California's Mojave Desert, which is the largest solar-thermal plant in the world. (See: Energy of the future - solar thermal power! )

Solar energy is still pricey, Hay acknowledged. ''This is going to be more expensive than power from conventional fossil fuels,'' he said. ''But you can't just look at the cents per kilowatt today, because there's a cost for fossil fuels that's not being reflected.''

He compared solar technology to the advent of the Toyota Prius, first considered "experiments, at best." He noted that sales of the hybrid car have risen from 15,000 in 2001 to more than 180,000 last year. "That's what I hope for solar power, as well," Hay said.

FPL, of Juno Beach, Florida, owns and operates about 38,000 MW of generating capacity across the United States, markets energy commodities, and transmits and distributes electricity to more than 4.5 million customers in Florida.