Good Energy Policy Begins With Asking Good Questions

The Cities for Climate Protection Campaign, The 2030 Challenge, Build Green Santa Fe, The Apollo Alliance, Green Cities, Mayor’s Climate Protection Agreement, The Green Gauntlet, and Smart Growth America – all of these programs have great sounding names and, perhaps, they give us hope about the direction our country is headed in tackling our energy and climate problems.

Why then, with so many programs already underway, does Local Energy News continue to report discouraging news, and highlight the lack of progress toward our goals? I do it because I believe that the only thing more damaging than great sounding programs that don’t really address our problems is the widespread belief that we are actually dealing with our problems, when we aren’t.

The folly of false hope is that it allows us to continue down false paths, reducing our chances of getting to the right path soon enough to make a difference. I don’t see many of the programs that have been put forward as being “good enough for now” or “a great start”, I see them instead as attempts to placate the public while the powers that be continue with their business as usual.

We don’t need to be energy experts to differentiate between programs that sound green, and those that truly are. All we need to do is ask different questions. For example:

Did the decision to allow private ownership of critical infrastructures, such as the electric power grid, leave us vulnerable to investor-owned monopolies and their profit motives?

Do new energy policies we are considering promote local self-reliance, or do they reward interests outside our communities and put control of our water and food in someone else’s hands?

Do our policies reward a particular energy technology, which we may or may not know enough about, rather than simply rewarding projects that meet the goals of our community?

Let’s not settle for saying that we want to “increase renewables” or “reduce carbon”. Let’s try setting broader goals, like “diversity of supply”, increased local ownership, use of local fuels and labor, and retention of energy dollars in the local community.

If you want to build a housing complex for seniors living on a fixed income, as Santa Fe just did, we shouldn’t allow the developer to install electric heat—the most expensive kind of heat—after giving the electric company the right to raise rates whenever it wants to. It takes no special knowledge of energy issues to know that you can’t protect the seniors in your community under such conditions.

It’s getting pretty late in the game to claim that we still don’t understand the energy game. Let’s ditch the whole conversation about “renewables” and “carbon” and start talking about local, independent businesses providing energy from fuels that we harvest locally.

That, more than any great sounding program, will get us where we need to go.

The video newscast containing this story is posted here.

Nationalize the Grid, and Empower Local Companies to Build Solar

Ten years ago, in 1998, New Mexico’s largest investor-owned utility, PNM, solicited bids to build a 5 megawatt solar electric power plant. Had the project gone forward, it would have been the world’s largest operating solar-electric power plant. But the project was stopped when 28 small solar companies in New Mexico, including my own, filed an objection.

As members of New Mexico’s Solar Energy Industries Association, each of us had mixed feelings about stopping a project that would surely bring attention to our state’s solar industry. But the more we learned about the project, the clearer it became that we needed to intervene.

The $50 million dollar price tag for the project was to be paid by ratepayers – financed over 20-years. But the cost of solar equipment at that time was falling every year, so we showed that by building smaller plants each year, we would end up with three times the installed solar capacity. Taking out a 20-year loan on equipment that falls in price every year makes no sense, but the project marched on anyway.

PNM was moving into the solar business – our business – with no risk, we argued, because they were allowed to bill all of their costs to ratepayers. This, while we were building solar power systems that needed PNM’s permission before they could be interconnected – permission that could be denied at any time, including after a system was built and ready to operate. Again, our objections were cast aside.

We filed a freedom of information request for the bids that had been submitted on the project, and found that the contract for the power plant had been awarded to the company that had received the lowest score on technology. It turned out that that company already had a contract with one of the members of the evaluation committee, but even this conflict of interest was not enough to stop the project.

So what finally put an end to PNM’s quest to build the world’s largest solar power plant?

We asked one, final, simple question about the project: What was PNM planning to do with the solar energy produced by the plant? It turned out that after collecting money from ratepayers to cover 100 percent of the costs for the plant, PNM was going to sell the solar energy to back to us. That did it – the project was mortally wounded when news of the double-billing hit the streets.

Now, ten years later, investor-owned utilities are contemplating another solar power plant – this one about 20-times the size of the last one. It’s too early to tell whether the same mischief will take place, but we can say with certainty that this project is based on the same, poor premise of putting investor-owned utilities in control of renewable energy.

This, while Denmark and other countries nationalize their power grids, modernize them to eliminate central control so that they can accept more renewable energy, and then promulgate feed-in tariffs to encourage small, independent companies to build renewable energy.

We can, and we must, do the same in the United States.

A video newscast containing this story is posted here.