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Arizona Commissioner Probes Utility's Secret Funding of Anti-Solar Campaign
mdsolar writes "An Arizona utility commissioner is asking for all the key players in a debate over a solar energy policy in the state to reveal any additional secret funding of nonprofits or public relations campaigns. The probe comes after Arizona Public Service, the state's largest utility, admitted last week that it had been secretly contributing to outside nonprofits running negative ads against solar power. As The Huffington Post reported Friday, APS recently admitted that it had lied for months about paying the 60 Plus Association, a national conservative organization backed by the Koch brothers, to run ads against current solar net-metering policy. APS is currently pushing the Arizona Corporation Commission to roll back the policy, which allows homeowners and businesses with rooftop solar energy systems to make money by selling excess energy back to the grid. Solar proponents say that the policy has facilitated a solar boom in the state, and that changing it could have a huge negative impact on future growth."
Clever arguments... a bit too clever.
I think folks in the energy/power sector are just worried about things turning out the way they did in Germany.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/08/20/2140215/germany-produces-record-breaking-51-terawatt-hours-of-solar-energy-in-one-month
Well... until and unless you actually want to argue that Germans are better at this stuff than Americans. But I doubt that so I will wait for some more clever explanation and excuses why the Germany story was a one-off and Sun is closer to the sun and/or sun is a communist.
That's not exactly how it works. First of all, the industrial grade inverter to supply energy back to the grid cleanly is about $2000 on the low end. Secondly, practically nobody has an array big enough to have a net gain where they actually get a check from the electric company. Maybe their electric bill went from $200 to $100 but to go -$100 is pretty unheard of. Third, the buyback rate is structured so that even if the company turned their power plant completely off because 10,000 private solar array owners were sufficient to power the entire local grid, they'd be paying out about what it would cost to run the power plant. In other words, there's still a profit built in.
The trick is not just producing a lot of power. The trick doing is doing it consistently, at low cost, and when you need it.
The Tea baggin' Koch Bros...
"The utility, the Arizona Public Service Company (APS), outed itself as a funder of two secretive nonprofits fueling the anti-solar fightâ"and revealed that it had funneled its anti-solar money through a political operative associated with the Koch brothers and their donor network."
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The Arizona net metering policy is already very protective of utilities' interests. http://www.dsireusa.org/incentives/incentive.cfm?Incentive_Code=AZ24R&re=1&ee=0
System size can't be larger that 125% of a customer's normal use and customer/generators only get paid at the avoided cost rate, not the retail rate for power generated beyond their annual use.
In New Mexico, First Solar is selling power at 5.79 cents a kilowatt-hour http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-01/first-solar-may-sell-cheapest-solar-power-less-than-coal.html so it seems hard to believe that this campaign is anything but a way for the Koch brothers to shake down APS.
There's a similar campaign against wind power in general going on in Idaho. I've only really seen billboards with vague questions associating wind power projects so corruption and insider deals, but it is pretty obviously a political campaign to stir up ill will in the voting public.
As if the utilities never made any corrupt or insider deals.
The way public utilities were originally set up was intended to deal with a regulated structural monopoly and keep a fair balance between ratepayers and the "owners" of the infrastructure. Since laissez-faire capitalism has been the fashion for the last 30 years the utility commisions have been packed with insiders and had any regulatory teeth taken away. Thank you Saint Ronnie of Alzheim.