The Koch Brothers’ Dirty War on Solar Power All over the country, the Kochs and utilities have been blocking solar initiatives — but nowhere more so than in Florida, Rolling Stone, By Tim Dickinson February 11, 2016 After decades of false starts, solar power in America is finally poised for its breakthrough moment. The price of solar panels has dropped by more than 80 percent since President Obama took office, and the industry is beginning to compete with coal and natural gas on economics alone.
The solar industry in Florida has been boxed out by investor-owned utilities (IOUs) that reap massive profits from natural gas and coal. These IOUs wield outsize political power in the state capital of Tallahassee, and flex it to protect their absolute monopoly on electricity sales. “We live in the Stone Age in regard to renewable power,” says state Rep. Dwight Dudley, the ranking Democrat on the energy subcommittee in the Florida House. “The power companies hold sway here, and the consumers are at their mercy.”
The full political might of Florida’s IOUs was on display in December, when a deceptive campaign, funded by the state’s electric utilities, crushed a citizen-led effort to open Florida to solar competition through the 2016 ballot. “When your opponents have no ethical foundation, have unlimited resources and are willing to say and do anything to defeat you,” says Stephen Smith, director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, which led the pro-solar effort, “it’s a tough hurdle to overcome.”……
The Smart Solar campaign played dirty. In a seemingly transparent effort to confuse petition-signers, the utility-backed measure aped the “choice” language of the rival pro-solar campaign with its formal ballot title. Smart Solar called itself Rights of Electricity Consumers Regarding Solar Energy Choice. “It’s pure deception,” an exasperated Smith tells Rolling Stone. “Many, many people have been misled into signing their petition – it’s fraud!” Bascom insisted there was no intention to mislead. “It would defy all logic,” she tells Rolling Stone. “Why would we confuse ours with one that does not have public support?”
In the end, the utilities crushed the Solar Choice campaign by spending it into submission. Qualifying an amendment for the ballot in Florida is onerous and expensive under the best of circumstances. It requires nearly 700,000 signatures, and any serious campaign hires paid gatherers.
By mounting a competing measure, the utilities sparked a financial arms race – with the utility-backed measure typically paying gatherers twice as much per signature. “When we were paying a dollar on the street, they were paying $2,” says Smith. “When we were paying $2, they went to $4.” Soon, the IOUs had forced solar proponents into a burn rate of $350,000 a week. It was unsustainable.
Solar Choice threw in the towel in January. The campaign is now regrouping, aiming to qualify instead for 2018, when more than 400,000 signatures it has gathered would still be valid. Smart Solar is pressing ahead for the November ballot. If it passes, the utilities will be entitled, under the constitution, to hit rooftop solar customers with high fees simply to maintain their connection to the grid.
But Florida Power & Light isn’t waiting until November to take a brazen victory lap. In January, it submitted a proposal to the PSC, seeking to hike its electric rates by nearly 24 percent over the next three years and asking the commission to reward FPL investors with a higher guaranteed rate of return. If approved, FPL’s electric consumers would typically pay an extra $13 a month.
“FPL spent millions fighting to deny consumers solar choice,”says Dooley, furious. “Now they have their hand out, asking for a subsidy.”
Florida is an extreme example of utility-funded efforts to thwart the rise of solar power at the state level. But it’s not unique. Major utilities across the nation are seeking to undermine competition from rooftop solar by hiking its cost. “The utilities have realized they’re completely up a creek without a paddle,” says Shah, who sees the utilities lashing out at solar not from a position of strength but of desperation. “They can certainly fight it. But they’re going to lose.”
The utilities are working from a playbook developed by ALEC – the Koch-funded group that promotes “model” bills, often adopted virtually wholesale by Republican legislatures – and the Edison Electric Institute, the utility trade group………
Hillary Clinton, by contrast, has promised to build on Obama’s plan, vowing to treat it as the “floor, not the ceiling.” Clinton has an ambitious plan for solar energy. She calls for the installation of half a billion solar panels in her first term – a move that she says would drive a sevenfold increase in U.S. solar-power production. For his part, Sanders has not detailed a specific solar policy, but has promised “massive” investments in clean power to drive an 80 percent reduction in emissions by 2050.
Over time, Dooley believes, solar power will win out, not only on the economics, but because there’s nothing partisan about it. In fact, she says, solar power is one of the few things on which Democrats, Republicans and independents can find common ground. “Who doesn’t want to be able to have solar panels on their rooftops?” Dooley asks. “Who doesn’t want to become an entrepreneur – selling energy generated on their private property to their neighbors, and make a profit off of it?”
Other than the monopoly utilities and the Koch brothers, who have their backs, she asks, “Who doesn’t want energy freedom?” http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-koch-brothers-dirty-war-on-solar-power-20160211#ixzz48VLqXG56
