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| A winter time reading from Tom Ferrio's energy use meter showing his solar panels generated more power than he used |
EDITOR’S NOTE: While Charlestown effectively bans residential wind energy,
there is no ban on residential solar power. Indeed, even people with opposite
politics views embrace solar power. Take CCA Party leader Tom Gentz and
Progressive Charlestown co-founder Tom Ferrio as examples.
ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council) is at it
again and this time, they are going after homeowners who have installed solar
panels. That would be people like me. Fortunately, I live in California, a
state run by Democrats, where Republicans don’t even have any dark corners left
in which to hide.
In a December report, Suzanne Goldberg of the Guardian wrote
that about 800 state legislators and business leaders were set to meet in one
of the super-secret, never open to the public meetings to discuss and vote on
the boiler-plate legislative measures that will then go out to bought and paid
for legislators willing to present them, sometimes unread – because that’s too
much like actually doing their jobs – and push them through the law-making bodies
of their states. Make no mistake, these pieces of legislation are designed to
benefit business interests and not the interests of the citizens of the states
“represented” by these so-called servants of the people.
There was a lot on the agenda and you can take a look HERE, but the thing that caught my eye is their plan to
introduce legislation to penalize homeowners who have installed solar panels on
their homes in an attempt to both lower their utility bills and help to
contribute to a cleaner environment. The ALEC bill seeks to charge these
“freerider” homeowners for feeding energy back into the grid.
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| Solar Panels on the roof of Tom Gentz's main house |
He was dismissive of the expense solar customers have
incurred to install their systems, saying, “How are they going to get that
electricity from their solar panel to somebody else’s house? They should be
paying to distribute the surplus electricity.”
Now, I don’t know how other states handle their solar
customers, although I found out that as of last November, Arizona actually
levies a surcharge on solar panel owners of about $5 a month to the average
homeowner for the offense of lowering their electric bills and feeding energy
back into the grid. That’s a lot better than the $100 surcharge sought by the
main utility company in the state, but still – really? People have to pay to
feed energy back into the grid so the utility company can then sell it to their
other customers?
I do know that here in California, my utility, PG&E, pays
me the wholesale price of the energy I feed back into the grid. Of course, when
they’re selling it to their other customers, they make a profit. But according
to ALEC, making a profit and having to actually pay someone for energy produced
that can then be sold in the marketplace – well, that just isn’t enough to make
up for the loss of the opportunity to further gouge those customers who have
gone to the expense of installing solar panels on their homes.
I say gouge
because the impetus for me to go solar was insanely high utility bills incurred
during one of the coolest summers I’ve experienced in my Northern California
locale. I wrote an article about it and you can read that HERE.
The attack on homeowners who have gone solar is just a
small fraction of the larger assault on the Obama Administration’s clean energy
policies. 2013 saw attempts in a number of states across the country to gut
clean energy policies, including conservative states like North Carolina,
Kansas and Ohio, but even with massive pushes to repeal the Renewable Portfolio
Standards, those measures failed. So the push for 2014 is to weaken those
standards.
Gabe Eisner, director of the Energy and Policy Institute,
said, “What we saw in 2013 was an attempt to repeal RPS laws, and when that
failed … what we are seeing now is a strategy that appears to be pro-clean
energy but would actually weaken those pro-clean energy laws by retreating to
the lowest common denominator.”
This organization called ALEC crafts laws that are
essentially wolves in sheep’s clothing. They look all nice and tidy, seem to be
in the best interests of the citizens of a state, but when examined, the ugly
underbelly of corporate profits at the expense of the citizens is always there,
waiting to pounce.
From the food that you eat, to your rights as a worker, to
holding corporations responsible for injuries inflicted upon the public, to
undermining public education in favor of for-profit (and sometimes totally
bogus) schools, to stripping environmental protections so oil, gas and coal
companies and their distributors can continue to despoil the environment and
then charge consumers for the cleanup of the messes they’ve made, this is a
corporate enterprise bent on taking everything it can from this country and her
people while giving back nothing but pain and suffering while they stand there
smiling and pick your pocket.
No matter who you are, no matter where you live, these
are issues that can directly affect you. But you have the power to make it all
go away. All you have to do is VOTE in the 2014 mid-term elections. Vote for
people who are pro-citizen, not pro-corporations. Vote for people who care
about your lives and not the bottom line of corporations owned by the likes of
the Koch Brothers.
If there are no candidates like that in your legislative
district, well, then maybe you might stand up and make a run for it yourself.
It’s the only way we will wrest this country – state by state – from the hands
of those who think the only meaning of green is money.
Ann
Werner is a blogger and the author of CRAZY and Dreams and Nightmares. You
can view her work at ARK Stories. Visit
her on Twitter @MsWerner and Facebook
