Meter in a Dark Alley?

For years, government and NGOs alike have been proselytizing about clean energy, the need to stop releasing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere to reverse the horrific and growing consequences of climate change as well as energy independence.

We’ve seen how new commercial methods – like fracking which has leached nasty chemicals into our underground water supplies – have made the United States the leading producer of natural gas and heading rapidly towards becoming the number two (behind Saudi Arabia) producer of oil in the world, nice for our energy giants and even for adding global supplies to help contain an unholy increase in the cost of gasoline, but pretty nasty since it reduces the motivation to stop burning fossil fuels.

We’ve watched as deadly meltdowns have taken out huge nuclear power plants in Russia and Japan, adding serious questions as to the dangers of expanding nuclear electrical power generation. And we’ve seen the beginning of acceptability of alternative energy in our daily lives. Hydroelectric and traditional coal-fired power plants still pump away.

This then is the state of energy-generation in the United States. But with growing levels of American residences generating their own electrical power through, primarily, solar panels, much of the surplus of which is required by law to be purchased by the local utility (“net metering” set out in 43 states and Washington, D.C.), many of these local power suppliers are beginning to push back. They have lost customers – and hence revenues – to the solar miscreants (often subsidized to install such panels) and are forced to pay for electricity that they might not want at prices they believe to be too high.

Let’s face it, the electricity from these solar sources is so small that it barely makes a measurable blip on our national power output, but it still instills fear in the hearts of big companies with non-environmental agendas at the fore: “According to the Energy Information Administration, rooftop solar electricity — the economics of which often depend on government incentives and mandates — accounts for less than a quarter of 1 percent of the nation’s power generation.

“And yet, to hear executives tell it, such power sources could ultimately threaten traditional utilities’ ability to maintain the nation’s grid…  ‘We did not get in front of this disruption,’ Clark Gellings, a fellow at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit arm of the industry, said during a panel discussion at the annual utility convention last month. ‘It may be too late.’ … Alarmed by what they say has become an existential threat to their business, utility companies are moving to roll back government incentives aimed at promoting solar energy and other renewable sources of power. At stake, the companies say, is nothing less than the future of the American electricity industry…

“In Arizona, for example, the country’s second-largest solar market, the state’s largest utility is pressuring the Arizona Corporation Commission, which sets utility rates, to reconsider a generous residential credit and impose new fees on customers, months after the agency eliminated a commercial solar incentive. In North Carolina, Duke Energy is pushing to institute a new set of charges for solar customers as well…  Nowhere, though, is the battle more heated than in California, home to the nation’s largest solar market and some of the most aggressive subsidies. The outcome has the potential to set the course for solar and other renewable energies for decades to come…

“Some keep the credit in line with the wholesale prices that utilities pay large power producers, which can be a few cents a kilowatt-hour. But in California, those payments are among the most generous because they are tied to the daytime retail rates customers pay for electricity, which include utility costs for maintaining the grid…  California’s three major utilities estimate that by the time the subsidy program fills up under its current limits [read: it hasn’t happened yet, but it might if the numbers are remotely right!!!], they could [could???] have to make up almost $1.4 billion a year in revenue lost to solar customers, and shift that burden to roughly 7.6 million nonsolar customers — an extra $185 a year if evenly spread. Some studies cited by solar advocates have shown, though, that the credit system can result in a net savings for the utilities.” New York Times, July 26^th.

While you most certainly can see both sides of this argument (if these utility numbers ever prove correct), the power companies are effectively advocating a plan to aggravate and accelerate climate change, a fact of life that, in the United States alone, has already intensified the consequences of hurricanes and storm surges, never-ending drought in some locales and devastating flooding in others, searing record temperatures and dwindling water supplies in particularly sensitive urban and rural areas.

Maybe it’s not their burden to carry (but is it really a burden or a projection of a very, very, very big maybe?), and perhaps there needs to be another economic approach, but until we implement such alternatives, given the very small amount of actual electricity that we really generate this way, we need to tell our legislators that this process of encouraging local solar power generation must continue. Our survival and the quality of our lives depend on it.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I cannot help but shudder as this potential misuse of maybe statistics to create a new policy so harmful to so many.