By now, I presume you’ve socked away plenty of cash in your I-Love-Nukes Fund. I sure hope so, because Tallahassee recently unleashed Progress Energy and Florida Power & Light to clip us in advance for their multi-billion dollar nuclear power plants.

They’ll begin with an advance of $282 million in 2012. Thank you, very much. And that’s just for starters. If you missed it in the media, you won’t miss it on your monthly electric bill as we subsidize power plants that don’t, and may never, generate electricity.

Remember this the next time you hear Tallahassee preaching the gospel of the free market. As voters and ratepayers, I suggest we look for candidates who campaign to repeal this corporate thievery, then strongly consider voting for them on Election Day.

Meantime, I keep waiting to hear that Pasco County, or one of its cities, has adopted a genuine free-market energy solution that could create jobs, spawn new businesses, stabilize property values, preserve the tax base, and maybe even begin to change the energy paradigm in this state.

Cue the crickets.

I’m referring to PACE, which stands for Property Assessed Clean Energy. The Florida Legislature also voted to pass this about 18 months ago (credit where it’s due). Governor Charlie Crist signed it into law.

Briefly stated, Florida’s PACE law authorizes special districts to issue bonds for the purpose of making loans to property owners who want to make clean-energy improvements. The bonds are privately financed, which means no tax subsidies or abusive rate hikes, and the loans are repaid as property assessments.

How would this produce jobs and new businesses? By making clean-energy retrofits available to a much larger group of property owners. Everyone wants to cut their utility bills but the cost is prohibitive. You’re looking at many thousands of dollars, if not many tens of thousands of dollars, for upgrades such as solar-water heaters, photovoltaic systems, energy-efficient windows, new insulation, low-energy lightin, and more.

Even if you have that kind of money, or access to an adequate line of credit, you still have to weigh the initial cost against the amount of time it might take to recover your investment. And what if you decide to sell your property before you recover that investment or pay off the loan? Can you be sure you will break even? Probably not.

PACE changes the equation by making clean-energy improvement loans, which are repaid with interest through district assessments over as many as 15 years. So, the property owner benefits immediately without spending a huge sum out of pocket or using her own credit. And she can sell her property without worrying because loan payments are assessments for which the next owner assumes responsibility, just as he assumes responsibility for paying property-tax assessments.

In case you’re wondering whether there’s enough demand for clean-energy improvements to warrant all this commotion, I’ll refer you back to this bit of unpleasantness. Floridians are acutely aware of rising energy costs and they’re plenty eager to find ways to reduce them. They have been for years.

As PACE districts unleash pent-up demand for clean-energy retrofits, businesses will figure out how to make money off it. Competition will materialize as new businesses are born and new jobs are created, followed by a little more economic prosperity than we’ve seen around here in a while.

I’ll even go you one better. Given my tendency to blue-sky things to absurd lengths, imagine a world where houses no longer rely on centralized power plants for electricity; a world where individual buildings pump excess energy back to the grid; a world where rooftop PV systems fuel our cars and toys.

Progress Energy and Florida Power & Light would hate that.