See if this paragraph from a recent article sounds familiar.
[Arizona] Utilities argue that rules allowing private solar customers to sell excess power back to the grid at the retail price — a practice known as net metering — can be unfair to homeowners who do not want or cannot afford their own solar installations.
It sounds like a statement straight from the Arizona Corporation Commission’s argument to lower the amount of money rooftop solar owners get when they sell power to utilities, but it isn’t. I added [Arizona] to a paragraph from an article in the Sunday New York Times: Rooftop Solar Dims Under Pressure From Utility Lobbyists. The article mentions Arizona, but it’s about the nationwide push to make rooftop solar less attractive so utilities can continue to make money without competition from individual home owners. (Deep down, you knew our Corporation Commissioners aren’t bright enough to come up with this on their own, right?)
How’s the lobbying going? Apparently, quite well.
Their effort has met with considerable success, dimming the prospects for renewable energy across the United States.
Prodded in part by the utilities’ campaign, nearly every state in the country is engaged in a review of its solar energy policies. Since 2013, Hawaii, Nevada, Arizona, Maine and Indiana have decided to phase out net metering, crippling programs that spurred explosive growth in the rooftop solar market. (Nevada recently reversed its decision.)
Spearheading the effort is the top energy lobbyist, Edison Electric Institute. Courtesy of the Trump administration, EEI now has close friends in high places. Trump’s energy secretary, dim-bulb Rick Perry, is giving lots of power to his brighter and more knowledgeable chief of staff, Brian McCormack, who used to be the top executive at EEI. McCormack is the head of an energy department study looking into—I’m not making this up—ways renewable energy could be hurting the coal, oil and gas industries. One of the hallmarks of capitalist theory is that competition leads to progress and benefits to consumers, but Perry and the current administration seem to be fond of protective socialism for utility companies.
Perry and the Edison Electric Institute are drawing even more anti-rooftop energy from other powerful sources. ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) has written model legislation to end net metering, which can be copied and pasted into state bills by simply filling in a few state-specific blanks. Among the major funders of ALEC are the Koch brothers, Charles and David. And back at the Department of Energy, Brian McCormack has named Travis Fisher, who used to work for the Koch-funded nonprofit, Institute for Energy Research, to head a study on the problems which come from adding renewables to the energy mix. But, according to the department, environmentalists needn’t worry about pro-utility industry bias.
“The department has no preconceived notions as to the findings and recommendations that will result from this review,” [Shaylyn Hynes, a spokeswoman for the Energy Department] said.
People who believe in the Paris Climate Agreement and the dangers of climate change can rest easy, according to Trump & Co. They just want to look at the facts and make an objective judgement. And if you believe that, in a few decades, I just might be able to sell you some oceanfront property in Arizona, for real.
This article appears in Jul 6-12, 2017.
Good job, David. You ferreted out one example of collusion to rig the system in the Trump administration. It’s not too hard to do. But the fallacy behind your approach to blogging is that your coverage is always lopsided: you’re always trying to give the impression that it’s only the Republicans who can be found playing this game. That is not the case, as Naomi Wolf points out in this excellent summary of what’s actually going on in this country these days:
“…issues are trotted out in election years to ramp up the appearance of differences between the parties. In reality, both are largely beholden, albeit in different proportions, to the Big Six, the major special interests: what I call War Inc. (and its emerging major subsidiary, Fear Inc., or the global surveillance and security industry), Big Pharma, Big Insurance, Big Oil, Big Agriculture, and Wall Street. We can probably add Big Incarceration to that list now. Smart voters realize that whatever their political beliefs, it is those who don’t hold power in these major industries — that is, all the rest of us: teachers and nurses, cops and factory workers, new immigrants and small business owners, the unemployed, the retired, veterans, and the plain old middle and working class — who […] are getting screwed.”
The difference seems to be that Republicans justify policies that screw the average citizen in propaganda emphasizing that “Benefiting industry benefits citizens!”, while Democrats justify policies that screw the average citizen in propaganda emphasizing that “Benefiting immigrants or minorities or the poor benefits citizens!” To what extent is either ever true? Hard to say, because the media almost never gives us rigorous policy analysis that reliably identifies WHO ACTUALLY BENEFITS from policies championed by the left and the right, they just shovel out more of the same exhausted and misleading tropes of R-flavor and D-flavor propaganda.
Larry Lessig got it right, here and elsewhere:
https://www.amazon.com/Republic-Lost-Version-Lawrence-Lessig/dp/1455537012/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1499796829&sr=8-1&keywords=larry+lessig
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-S015VTUTk
But the “Democratic” Party changed the debate qualifying rules and shut down his referendum candidacy, just as they shut down Bernie Sanders’ grassroots funded campaign with their Superdelegates and primaries in which Independents could not vote.
Face it, David: the Democrats have long since given up whatever right they may have previously enjoyed to be considered the party of clean hands that successfully defends the interest of the working classes. By all means, keep pointing out how dirty the Republicans are. I just hope your Koolaid-drinking readership recognizes that unfortunately, stories about dirty Republicans don’t make the Democrats any cleaner than they are, either locally or nationally.
The first paragraph reads like every Democratic proposal to punish/reward those they decide on. Nothing new.
Isn’t the issue here that the utilities are stuck with the ongoing costs of maintaining the grid, while, as more people adopt solar, the utilities have fewer rate payers to whom to spread that cost?
If people have not figured it out by now, governments and corporations will ALWAYS do what is best for them, regardless of all the public releases, public relations, advertising, and public service announcements and on and on.
The electorate and consumers are only a revenue stream for both governments and corporations.
Decreasing costs and increasing the bottom line is the primary goal. If the public is served or services are provided, consider yourself fortunate and move on, but always remember whether it is the government or corporations caveat emptor ALWAYS applies.
This issue is more complicated than most of the discussions about it. There is no question that renewable engery sources are the future and possible large job creator in The countries that act positively to promote. The US can be the Saudia Arabia of wind power and the west is a natural source of solar power. Solar Power is the source of all power on the planet and is available in quantities that far exceed our future needs. However, transition to renewable energy is a complicated process that completely transforms our electric utilities. There will always be a need for a backup engery source and electric utilities provide that and will provide that for the foreseeable future. The problem utilities face is that renewable energy sources are not continuous and availableability usually does not match demand. The current system is a real time system with very little energy storage capability to shift energy availableability to times of peak demand. The technology for this is developing but not proven and very expensive.
The reliability of roof top generation at this time is quite questionable, very few of us can live off of roof top generation.
The result is redundant generation and transmission capabilities until a newer renewable based system can be implemented. This is going to be a very expensive but necessary process. Yes, like in most situations the consumer will be paying and that is not an easy sell even if Utilities were willing to take on the task.
…and in the interim until a renewable based system can be implemented, we won’t be requiring representatives of the renewable and conventional energy industries to work together to achieve that with a minimum of damage to their respective labor forces and at minimal cost to the consumer? Rather, under a Republican administration we will allow people who profit from the conventional system to try to delay, or, if possible, shut down the growth of the renewable energy sector, in a context where it’s clearly in the long term best interests of the environment and the American economy as a whole (not certain sectors of it) to become less dependent on energy available through the oil, coal, and natural gas industries? Or, if the other major political party were in power, we would allow their affiliated elected representatives to manipulate policy to stimulate growth of the renewable sector before the grid has been altered to use the energy the renewable sector generates efficiently?
Where is the authority that should be able to mediate between self-interested parties to ensure that the goal is the common good, not competing individual goods? (What the government SHOULD be doing, if there is any justification for the collective economic power of the people being pooled through taxation.)
Nowhere, it does not exist. Not in this system, where the government, which should represent the people, has been hijacked by the money interests, and we now have a system where the Rs represent one set of money interests and the Ds another. The LABOR & CONSUMER components of the capitalist system have been left unrepresented, while various factions within the CAPITAL & VENDOR components occupy all the effective seats at the collective bargaining table.
If there is a solution to the current gridlock, it is to organize to give LABOR & the CONSUMER, who need clean, efficiently organized, and affordable energy, a voice in the conversation. Contra Safier, this is not something we should still be looking to the Democratic Party and its candidates to do. They have long since made themselves part of the problem. Whether the ultimate goal is to reform the Democrats from within or take over the place in the system they have in the past sometimes occupied, it’s only the kind of external pressure a third party can apply that can at this point improve the situation of “all the rest of us: teachers and nurses, cops and factory workers, new immigrants and small business owners, the unemployed, the retired, veterans, and the plain old middle and working class.”
Not many of us have a stake in the energy industries, either renewable or conventional, but the vast majority of us are in the position of having to LABOR to earn the money to PURCHASE energy, and it’s the so-called “Democratic” Party’s failure to effectively organize the laboring and purchasing power in the country (instead of a subset of the capital and vendor power) that is a very large part of the problem on this policy issue and on many, many others.
I beg to differ with this statement:
“The reliability of roof top generation at this time is quite questionable, very few of us can live off of roof top generation.”
On the contrary, learning to live with consuming far less energy per capita than U.S. energy hogs do now is the ONLY way we will be able to avoid catastrophic climate change. Wind and solar, as critically important as they are, do not buy us a get-out-of-climate-catastrophe-free card, and will only become sufficient to meet our needs if we reduce the amount of energy we consume. It’s time for Americans to grow up and accept that fact.
That said, we have a looong way to go before we run up against the sort of system limitations to renewables that are discussed above. In the meantime, we need to do everything we can can to transition to renewables as quickly as possible, which certainly includes preserving net metering. Even in a state like Arizona, where we could meet all of our energy needs with solar alone, renewables are still just a tiny fraction of our energy profile.
So then, solar is going to eliminate climate change. That is great news.
[phone ring]
“Hello. Oh, hi John, what’s going on?”
“Oh, running out of space on your batteries?”
“Sure, sure, I have space on mine, and I’ll pay you for your excess. Sure, just bring the batteries over to my house later this evening, I’ll swap ’em out with you for a couple of my empty batteries, and pay you what we usually pay each other. No need to involve the utility companies. Okay, see you then. Bye.”
[CLICK]
Go to Hell, Koch.
Death to ALEC!!
The problem is that the solar power is all released when the utilities do not need it. The power should be stored on batteries and released during Peak Demand periods.