Dirty Energy Fighting Dirty to Kill Solar in Kentucky

Jim Gooch has been the stupidest and most corrupt member of a stupid and corrupt General Assembly for decades.  His name on legislation guarantees the bill will severely harm the poorest and most defenseless Kentuckians.  Compared to the Gooch, Jim Inhofe is a tree-hugger.

Of course Gooch is getting rich by doing utilities' dirty work to kill renewable energy.

Tom Eblen at the Herald:

The anti-solar energy bill that was narrowly passed by the House and is awaiting action in the Senate illustrates two weaknesses in Kentucky’s civic character: We try to cling to the past, and we tolerate dirty politics.

House Bill 227 was written by electric utilities to protect their monopolies by discouraging Kentuckians from installing solar panels on their homes.

Under current law, homeowners with solar panels get full credit for excess power they feed into the utility grid on sunny days for when they need to draw it out at night or on cloudy days. This bill would significantly cut that credit, while making them pay full price for power they draw out.

SNIP
 
Solar panel installers — mostly small businesses scattered around the state — say drastically cutting the so-called net metering rate would all but put them out of business, costing Kentucky hundreds of jobs. Fewer homeowners will install solar panels if low credit rates make it harder for them to recoup their investment. 

What this bill is really about is protecting the utilities’ traditional business model and protecting their monopolies on generating electricity. It’s as if carriage makers a century ago had tried to ban automobiles from the road, claiming they were unfair to horses.

SNIP

 he story of how this bill even made it to the House floor is a case study in dirty politics. 

It was the work of Rep. Jim Gooch of Providence, a Democrat-turned-Republican and longtime chairman of the House Natural Resources and Energy Committee. Gooch, the coal industry’s best friend in Frankfort, is most famous for a 2007 legislative hearing he organized on the science of climate change that included no scientists, only climate-change deniers.

ead more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/tom-eblen/article205488339.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/tom-eblen/article205488339.html#storylink=cpy

Matt Bevin Doesn't Know What the Fuck He's Doing, Part 21

For forty years, it's been standard repug operating procedure to put the foxes in charge of all the public services henhouses: public health, worker safety, education, environmental protection, you name it.  But the one that they really slaver over because of the potential to obscenely enrich the already wealthy at the expense of consumers is the Public Service Commissioner.

The PSC regulates all the fundamental services the people need to live: water, electricity, natural gas, phone service.

The PSC decides how much of a rate increase the corporations that control those services get to cram down your throat to increase their profits.  The PSC decides which fracking companies get to run explosive, toxic chemical pipelines through your front yard without your permission.  The  PSC decides how much it costs to heat or cool your home, bathe with clean water, call 911 in an emergency.

The last thing you want to do is appoint to the PSC "bidnessmen" who will let utilities run roughshod over Kentuckians.

So of course that's what Governor Lying Coward has done.

From the press release:

Governor Matt Bevin has appointed Robert Cicero, a Florence businessman, to the Kentucky Public Service Commission (PSC).

“Bob Cicero’s experience as an independent businessman and his background as an accountant will be an asset to an agency that makes decisions affecting the lives of nearly every Kentuckian,” Gov. Bevin said. “I am grateful for his willingness to serve the Commonwealth in this key position.”

Cicero was appointed to a serve the remainder of a term that expires on July 1. He is eligible for reappointment to a full four-year term.

Since 2011, Cicero has been co-owner of High Performance Coolers LLC, which sells high-end coolers for personal and commercial uses. He previously was owner of MCM Clinical Research LLC and chief financial officer and treasurer of Aristech Acrylics LLC, both in Florence.

Cicero holds a Master of Business Administration degree from the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh.

“I am delighted to have someone with Bob’s extensive knowledge of the issues facing Kentucky businesses join the Public Service Commission,’’ Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet Secretary Charles G. Snavely said.

"Issues facing Kentucky businesses."  The PSC is not supposed to give a flying fuck about "issues facing Kentucky businesses." The PSC is supposed to care about regulating PUBLIC SERVICES to the benefit of, you know, THE PUBLIC.

But to Bevin and his business appointees, the public is just a source of money to be siphoned into the offshore tax-haven accounts of the filthy rich.

The Threat of Solar Energy

They hate what they're afraid of, and they're afraid for good reason.

Undercover Blue at Hullabaloo:

Remember Solyndra, that failed solar tech startup the GOP tried to hang around President Obama's neck like an albatross? Mitt Romney campaigned in front of the closed Solyndra factory in 2012, trying to deflect attention from his vulture capitalist record at Bain Capital. See, the problem was that Big Gummint was perturbing the economic gods with clean energy subsidies, "stifling free market competition by picking economic winners and losers."

Yesterday, I concluded a post noting that it is some kind of article of faith on the right that "government shouldn't pick winners and losers." Rather than call them hypocrites this fine Sunday morning, let's just say they apply that principle somewhat unevenly.

The Washington Post this morning looks at the growing threat rooftop solar poses to the big utility companies. Industry executives met in Colorado three years ago to plan how to fight back, Joby Warrick reports:

If demand for residential solar continued to soar, traditional utilities could soon face serious problems, from “declining retail sales” and a “loss of customers” to “potential obsolescence,” according to a presentation prepared for the group. “Industry must prepare an action plan to address the challenges,” it said.

The warning, delivered to a private meeting of the utility industry’s main trade association, became a call to arms for electricity providers in nearly every corner of the nation. Three years later, the industry and its fossil-fuel supporters are waging a determined campaign to stop a home-solar insurgency that is rattling the boardrooms of the country’s government-regulated electric monopolies.

Those free-market zealots among the Koch-backed American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have been trying to roll back solar expansion that threatens the fossil fuels industry with "potential obsolescence," as the Post described it above. They've been trying to leverage their influence with Republican lawmakers. The free-marketeers want government help in guaranteeing they stay winners. There's one big problem:

The average price of photovoltaic cells has plummeted 60 percent since 2010, thanks to lower production costs and more-efficient designs. Solar’s share of global energy production is climbing steadily, and a study last week by researchers from Cambridge University concluded that photovoltaics will soon be able to out-compete fossil fuels, even if oil prices drop to as low as $10 a barrel.

Turns out that instilling that free-market fervor can really bite when you're operating a government-sanctioned monopoly and even conservatives and evangelicals in red states like Utah like putting solar panels on their church roofs. Trying to impose a solar surcharge offends their free-market sensibilities, so carefully cultivated by the right.

Legislative efforts in Indiana and Utah to slow down solar's expansion by outlawing "net metering" (homeowners selling excess power they generate back to the grid) have failed. "Some of the proposals were virtual copies of model legislation drafted two years ago by the American Legislative Exchange Council," Warrick writes.

It's not easy being mean.

Meanwhile:

Hawaii is on track to pass legislation this year requiring the state to go 100 percent renewable by 2040.

Earlier this month, committees in the Hawaii House and Senate both unanimously recommended bills that would raise the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) from the current target of 70 percent by 2030 to the ultimate goal of 100 percent by 2040. Hawaii has had an RPS since 2001, and right now the state gets just over 21 percent of its power from renewable sources — a 12 percent increase in just six years.

This is huge for our state’s future.

“Even our utility is saying we can hit 65 percent by 2030, so 100 percent is definitely doable,” Sen. Mike Gabbard (D), sponsor of the Senate bill, SB 2181, and chair of Hawaii’s Energy and Environment Committee, told ThinkProgress. “This is huge for our state’s future. Each year, we spend $3 to $5 billion importing fossil fuels to power our economy. Our electricity bills are roughly three times the national average.”

Solar's Winning, So Dead Industries Are Attacking

Fossil-fuel-addicted utilities had their chance 40 years ago to buy up the baby solar and wind industries, toss them pocket change in resources and wait for them to grow up and conquer the world.

Instead, the utilities and their Big Oil and Big Gas pushers laughed and pointed while renewables struggled for decades to get to the point they should have - with utility backing - reached in 1980.

Now the solar tortoise has reached the finish line and the utility hares are panicking and attacking.

Zandar:

As Steve Benen notes, recent breakthroughs in solar panel technology, power storage, and compact design has now made solar power a threat to the energy giants and the big mega-corporations that thrive off of forcing Americans to buy coal, gas, and oil-fueled electricity.  The Koch Brothers have officially declared war on the sun, folks.

The Koch brothers, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist and some of the nation’s largest power companies have backed efforts in recent months to roll back state policies that favor green energy. The conservative luminaries have pushed campaigns in Kansas, North Carolina and Arizona, with the battle rapidly spreading to other states.

Alarmed environmentalists and their allies in the solar industry have fought back, battling the other side to a draw so far. Both sides say the fight is growing more intense as new states, including Ohio, South Carolina and Washington, enter the fray.

Solar power is becoming more and more viable, so that viability must be crushed.

At the nub of the dispute are two policies found in dozens of states. One requires utilities to get a certain share of power from renewable sources. The other, known as net metering, guarantees homeowners or businesses with solar panels on their roofs the right to sell any excess electricity back into the power grid at attractive rates.

Net metering forms the linchpin of the solar-energy business model. Without it, firms say, solar power would be prohibitively expensive.

The power industry argues that net metering provides an unfair advantage to solar consumers, who don’t pay to maintain the power grid although they draw money from it and rely on it for backup on cloudy days. The more people produce their own electricity through solar, the fewer are left being billed for the transmission lines, substations and computer systems that make up the grid, industry officials say.

The result?  Red states are starting to pass laws that charge consumers increasingly higher fees if they use solar power, in order to price solar panels out of the market. Instead of being able to sell power back to the power company, solar panel owners would have to pay exorbinant fees instead to be off the grid, and that will destroy the industry.

The Kochs and their allies don't want us off oil and coal.  Ever.  And they will obliterate anyone who gets in their way.

 I wonder what Northern Kentucky's own teabagger congress critter thinks of  the utilities and coal companies screwing his constituents on solar power when he himself lives off the grid in an all-solar house and drives a plug-in electric car.

KY Senate Rushes to Let AT&T Kill Rural Phone Service

Quick, somebody go check the copy of the U.S. Constitution in the National Archives; somebody must have scratched out the third word of the Preamble and added a new one, so that now it reads:

 

We the Corporations

 

Because we are truly a nation of the Corporations, by the Corporations and for the Corporations

 

John Cheves at the Herald:

A bill that would further reduce state regulation of telephone service in Kentucky could speed through Senate committee and floor votes Thursday.

Senate Bill 99 is the newest version of what many at the state Capitol call "the AT&T bill," because that company has played a key role in pushing the deregulation proposal for several years. Critics blocked it in the past, saying it could leave rural Kentuckians stranded without cheap and reliable land-line service while freeing the major phone companies to pursue more profitable high-tech customers.

SNIP

Since 2011, AT&T's political action committee has given about $55,000 to state election campaigns in Kentucky, including $5,000 to the Senate Republican majority's chief fundraising committee and $5,000 more to the House Democratic majority's chief fundraising committee. The company spent $108,846 last year on legislative expenses related to its 22 Frankfort lobbyists.

The article fails to mention the biggest problem with eliminating landlines and forcing people to use cell phones: electricity service in the Commonwealth is extremely unreliable. Every time a puff of wind knocks a tree limb onto an overhead power line, power goes out to thousands of people for hours if not days. No electricity, no cell phones.

Not that the Kentucky General Assembly or the Public Service Commission, which have consistently refused to force utilities to bury power lines, gives a shit about citizens injured and dead from being unable to call for help.

The Grid Is What Holds Us Together

I am saving my pennies to buy solar panels for my roof, and writing my legislators to demand a feed-in-tariff law that will force the electric company to pay me for the juice I produce, but what I really want is storage battery technology that will allow me to go off the grid altogether.

But that path leads to destruction, as Steve M explains:

To some extent, I like the idea of decentralized power -- I think it's good when individuals buy or lease equipment that allows them to generate solar or geothermal energy and bypass local utilities, or even sell power back to those utilities. If businesses can do the same thing with fuel cells, that's an interesting development.

But in this country I worry that decentralization of energy generation could eventually reinforce the notion that there's no need for society to ensure universal access to what we now consider life's basics: electricity, telephone service, clean water, police and fire protection, primary and secondary education.

Just a couple of days ago we had Aaron Osmond, a Utah state senator, arguing that compulsory education is bad for parents and children:

"Some parents act as if the responsibility to educate, and even care for their child, is primarily the responsibility of the public school system," Osmond wrote. "As a result, our teachers and schools have been forced to become surrogate parents, expected to do everything from behavioral counseling, to providing adequate nutrition, to teaching sex education, as well as ensuring full college and career readiness." ...

"Let's let them choose it, let's not force them to do it," he said. "I think that's when you start seeing the shift."

We had Rick Santorum in 2011 denouncing the very existence of public schools ("'Just call them what they are,' Santorum said. 'Public schools? That's a nice way of putting it. These are government-run schools'"). We had Ron Paul getting applause at a tea party-sponsored presidential debate for suggesting that an uninsured young man in a coma should be allowed to die rather than given medical treatment. We have communities where firefighters let your home burn to the ground if you haven't paid the firefighting fee. And on and on.

We know that all the kewl young dudebros these days dig libertarianism. Is it the future? Will a coalition of libertarian hipsters and government-hating teabaggers usher in an era when dope is legal and NSA snooping is banned but education and clean drinking water are luxury goods? I may not live to see it, but I can imagine that as a possible future.

 In a follow-up post, he writes:

  ... I see a New York magazine piece by Bay Area resident Kevin Roose about how private shuttles run by Silicon Valley high-tech firms have muscled in on public bus stops in San Francisco -- a practice to which the government is now capitulating:

Silicon Valley shuttles have been commandeering Muni stops for years. It's always been illegal. And yet, city officials have mostly turned a blind eye. Now, instead of forcing these buses off their turf, they're bowing. It's as if Goldman Sachs were running its own trains on the 2/3 line [in Manhattan], and instead of shutting them down, the MTA decided to rearrange its own schedules to make sure Goldmanites could get from the Upper West Side to work on time.

In my experience, these Silicon Valley shuttles are very popular with the young, educated, upper-income tech workers who take them, and abhorred by most other city residents. According to the Chronicle, residents have been filing "complaints about shuttles forcing Muni buses to disgorge passengers in the middle of streets, blocking crosswalks, backing up traffic, traveling on restricted streets and interfering with bicycles using bike lanes."

During the recent transit strike in San Francisco, Roose wrote about the way upscale residents turned to car-booking and ride-sharing services, which wasn't a feasible solution for low-wage commuters:

... when policy-makers begin to see these services as legitimate replacements for public infrastructure, their incentives to make public services better will disappear. The BART strike has shown how decades of erosion of the tax base, coupled with the rise of a tech-savvy elite that can afford to pay for private services, has reduced public transportation to a second-class alternative and taken away much of the subway unions' negotiating leverage. After all, with so many private options for getting around, why does it matter if a few hundred thousand BART riders are stranded?

I just see this as part of an increasingly widespread belief, in blue as well as red America, that government-provided and government-guaranteed services are shoddy and second-rate and not really important because they're for, y'know, other people.

In our corporate-owned society, public services are available to everyone only to the extent that the rich need them.  As soon as the rich can replace a public service with a private one, they refuse to let tax dollars pay to provide that service to the non-rich.

Like I keep sayin': the rich are a clear and present danger to a democratic society.  They are parasites who suck everything out of the body politic and give nothing in return. Tax them out of existence.