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The Koch Brothers Attack On Solar Energy
Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "The NYT writes in an editorial that for the last few months, the Koch brothers and their conservative allies in state government have been spending heavily to fight incentives for renewable energy, by pushing legislatures to impose a surtax on this increasingly popular practice, hoping to make installing solar panels on houses less attractive. 'The coal producers' motivation is clear: They see solar and wind energy as a long-term threat to their businesses. That might seem distant at the moment, when nearly 40 percent of the nation's electricity is still generated by coal, and when less than 1 percent of power customers have solar arrays. But given new regulations on power-plant emissions of mercury and other pollutants, and the urgent need to reduce global warming emissions, the future clearly lies with renewable energy.' For example, the Arizona Public Service Company, the state's largest utility, funneled large sums through a Koch operative to a nonprofit group that ran an ad claiming net metering would hurt older people on fixed incomes (video) by raising electric rates. The ad tried to link the requirement to President Obama. Another Koch ad likens the renewable-energy requirement to health care reform, the ultimate insult in that world. 'Like Obamacare, it's another government mandate we can't afford,' the narrator says. 'That line might appeal to Tea Partiers, but it's deliberately misleading,' concludes the editorial. 'This campaign is really about the profits of Koch Carbon and the utilities, which to its organizers is much more important than clean air and the consequences of climate change.'"
Seems like it is only a matter of time until coal power goes away. It will be a long time, granted, but in the next decade or two solar will get so cheap that the impact on traditional centralized generation will be quite severe. I guess they are watching what is happening in Germany with horror and realizing that is their future too.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
...that you disapprove just as much of Michael Bloomberg (another billionaire that spends a lot of money trying to influence politics) when he decides to buy a "grass roots" effort as you do when the Koch Brothers try to do so?
Or does the choice of cause mean that one billionaire trying to influence politics is worse than the other billionaire trying to influence politics?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
America is being made worse by what the rich choose to fight.
They're more interested in protecting their own (sizable) wealth than they are about the future of humanity, the environment, or anything else.
These assholes should be suspended over the smokestack of a coal plant for about 6 months.
Where is Captain Planet when we need him?!
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They are not against energy subsidies, they are against renewable, and in particular solar, subsidies. They love their own subsidies, which means the title is very correct.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Can you spot the irony in all this? These corporations that are fighting against government subsidized green energy are all those who have themselves grown enormously through different types of government subsidies.
It's amazing how well the twisted corporationist logic sinks into the general public. The corporations on one hand speak for capitalism and free market, but on the other they cling to government subsidies and form monopolies effectively wiping out any competition on their markets.
Roosevelt once stated that this type of centralization of power in the private sector that corporations have today, could eventually lead to fascism. In some way, I don't think he was too far off.
This piece is by the New York Times editorial board, not a politician. Would you propose no one talk about the power of money in politics, just because it affects both parties? I, for one, would prefer that people talk about the corrupting influence of money on the political process whenever it occurs, so that, maybe some day, enough people will be fed up with it to do something about it.
That doesn't mean I support a politician with big money backers using the fact that his opponent accepts campaign contributions as a cheap ad hominem, however, but that's not what this is.
can you back that up with figures and links?
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Ban political contributions altogther, beginning of solving the problem.
How do they mean higher prices for everyone else? There is no evidence to support that claim.
Solar does not typically use net 0 energy, and they do not get retail prices, they get wholesale prices, and then still have to pay retail for the energy they use at night, meaning they have to use much less energy in the evening, than during the days, to be able to have a net 0.
In addition since they only get wholesale prices the energy companies are making money off of the energy that the customers generate.
Lastly even if a customer is net 0 there is no evidence that they cost other individuals a penny.
So the person spewing the bullshit seems to be you
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Seems like it is only a matter of time until coal power goes away. It will be a long time, granted, but in the next decade or two solar will get so cheap that the impact on traditional centralized generation will be quite severe.
I hope you are correct but I think you are being wildly optimistic. Coal isn't going to disappear anytime in the next 40+ years baring some unexpected technological breakthrough. The US and China have HUGE amounts of coal and can get to it relatively cheaply. Solar will not catch up on a cost basis without continued subsidies for an unclear amount of time. Coal has an economic advantage because power plants that utilize coal are not required to pay the full economic cost. Even the cleanest coal plants are able to dump significant amounts of pollutants into the environment without any economic direct consequences. To level the playing field coal will need to be required to account for these costs and I don't really see that happening in any reasonably foreseeable configuration of political leadership in most of the world. There simply are too many people making too much money from fossil fuels for that to be likely to occur.
Solar is advancing relatively fast but it's no panacea and absent some energy storage breakthrough it's of limited use when the sun isn't shining. We should definitely advance solar as far as it will take us but it's not going to solve the entire problem alone. Same issue with wind. Very useful but difficult to predict availability on short time scales. Nuclear fission is current the only non-fossil fuel power source we have with sufficient generating capacity to serve as a base load in place of fossil fuel sources in places not blessed with hydro or geo-thermal close by. Obviously fission carries its own set of problems which are well known.
I guess they are watching what is happening in Germany with horror and realizing that is their future too.
Germany is spending a LOT of money to subsidize solar. It's unclear whether this is economically sensible though I do hope that their experiment proves a success. However there are (too) many here in the US who regard that sort of subsidy as blasphemy and will do everything they can to fight it. The fact that many of these same people will ironically support subsidies (both explicit and implicit) for fossil fuel production will never come up because they are supported by that industry.
Shills from coal industry in Germany talk about German Energiewende like about manna from heaven. They're massively building up coal and firing up all the old plants as much as they can becuase of it and raking in massive profits.
If I could be seen to be shilling for anything, it's not shutting down fission in Germany and replacing it with coal, as Energiewende has basically done.
Need a Venn Diagram for the subsidies that the Koch brothers oppose.
Draw a large circle, and write "government subsidies of any kind" in it. Then, draw a larger circle around it, and label it "subsidies that the Koch brothers oppose.
Yes, the Koch brothers oppose solar subsidies, because they are subsidies.
It is also disingenuous to say they want surtaxes on solar. While it may be true, the context is that there are surtaxes on other forms of energy, and they want a level playing field.
This is a very bad summary.
But that is stupid. The whole point of putting surtaxes on non-renewable forms of energy is that they are non-renewable so by using them today you are storing up costs for the future when they are gone. The problems can be to do with having to mitigate the effects of more CO2 in the atmosphere or with them simply running out but either way we know there will be a cost down the line, so since government will ultimately have to foot the bill either way they impose a tax to mitigate that (in theory anyway, even if they do then spend it on some other crap).
With solar power however the energy gained is absolutely free at the point of generation. If you don't put a solar panel in the way then that solar energy would have just contributed to warming the planet when it hit the ground underneath. This is (or should be) the main reason why no tax is paid on energy from solar. Maybe you should even get a tax-rebate for using solar to generate electricity as the energy you generate would normally have contributed to global warming as it hit the ground and heated it. (ok, I studied years of physics so know this is a stretch but I still think it a net benefit, however minute)
I can understand (although I do not agree with, we need to encourage more solar use, not less) the idea of putting a small tax on solar panels themselves as they are quite polluting to produce, but once they are built they actually do far more good for the planet than bad, unlike all the fossil fuels the Kock brothers make their money from.
I dont read
So your position is that the Koch brothers are for improved fairness in taxation by imposing new taxes on emerging industries? I don't believe that for one second. They see a threat to their profit and they are attacking. I have no idea how you can try to pretend this is benevolence.
Using locally produced solar energy in a northern area that sees peak energy usage in the middle of winter is not really a good idea
They don't use air conditioning in Germany? Solar isn't going to fix every problem but even if it can solve just part of the problem then it remains a good idea. Why would you not want to use relatively clean solar energy for at least those times when it is available? The only credible argument against solar power is an economic one. No it will not be able to supply all our power needs but neither is any other single source of fuel. They all have drawbacks of one sort or another. What seems abundantly clear however is that any technology that allows us to reduce use of fossil fuels at reasonable economic cost is a good thing.
There is this stupid tendency here on slashdot to dismiss partial solutions to any problem as unworkable. Solar does not have to supply all our energy needs to still be a good idea. The economics of it still need to make sense but there is no principled reason why it should not be a significant part of the energy supply equation.
and they do not get retail prices, they get wholesale prices
That depends on where you're located. In some places you only get wholesale, in others you get paid retail, and in some you can even get more than retail (TVA pays retail + $0.04/kWh for solar for the first 10 years after a system is installed: http://dsireusa.org/incentives/incentive.cfm?Incentive_Code=TN02F).
In addition, how you get paid also varies. Some places only allow you to offset your usage with what you generate for that current billing cycle. Other let you build up credits that can be used to offset your usage for a greater period of time, and others will actually pay you for your excess power.
I happen to live in an area that pays retail and lets you save credits for 12 months to offset your usage.
Fossil fuels will become obsolete sooner or later, and the world will be better off for it.
While I would love that to be true, what technology do you think is going to make that happen? Solar and wind cannot do the job by themselves due to their unpredictability on time scales shorter than months. Nuclear fission is feasible but the waste and operational safety concerns make it too much of a political and economic hot potato. Geothermal and hydro simply aren't available in a lot of locations in sufficient quantity. Transmission losses force power generation to need to be relatively close to point of use and there is no economically viable form of superconductivity. Nuclear fusion and other more exotic power sources remain perpetually 25 years away.
I'd love to say that fossil fuels are doomed but I don't see any reasonably likely scenario in at least the next 40 years where that could possibly be true. Sure we might see a breakthrough in fusion or energy storage that would change the equation significantly but we cannot presume such a breakthrough will occur. We absolutely should maximize our use of solar and wind. Nuclear could be a bigger piece of the energy pie. Fossil fuels should be regulated to ensure that they have to pay the full cost of their use including all pollution they cause. But will all that occur? I doubt it.
If you don't put a solar panel in the way then that solar energy would have just contributed to warming the planet when it hit the ground underneath.
The energy you produce with the panels is still going to end up as heat. No?
The problem with AZ is that the power company was paying 4 times the going rate to buy power from solar panel users.
In essence making the rest of the consumers pay for people's solar panels.
If it were the going rate, I would have no issue with solar panels, but why should I pay more so someone else can have solar panels?
That rationalization doesn't require conspiracies, malevolence, or corruption. It passes Occam's razor, so it therefore is wholly unsuitable as a Slashdot story.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Since our economy is far less dependent on heavy manufacturing than it used to be, we're not in nearly as much trouble as other nations.
As a percentage of they overall economy yes but in absolute size the US manufacturing sector is enormous. Depending on how you measure it the US manufactures $2-4 Trillion in goods each year which is roughly the size of the entire GDP of Russia. The only country with a manufacturing sector even close to that in size is China. The "death" of manufacturing in the US has been greatly exaggerated. Manufacturing is a large and vital portion of the US economy and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
The world has never faced a technology which had the potential to take out the entire human ecosystem before.
You mean like nuclear weapons? Perhaps you are not old enough to remember the Cold War. We've had the capability to destroy the entire planet for roughly 60 years and on a few occasions have come disturbingly close to doing it. Fossil fuel pollution is a serious threat but it's not the first technology in a position to wipe us out entirely. Fossil fuel pollution has only become an acute threat in the last few decades though that should not be interpreted to minimize the seriousness of the problem.
Well, pretty obviously yes. In this universe, anyway.
For example, a billionaire influencing politics so that certain ethnicities are rounded up and placed in offshore torture camps is clearly worse than a billionaire influencing politics so that charities that provide surgery for children with cleft palates are exempt from taxation.
Jebus, I hope you were trolling.
like the other dude said, these subsidies are only for well-off people who can afford the investment, the peons get thrown under the bus. If you ever complained about the divide between the haves and the have-nots, guess what - it's the same thing of privatizing the gains by the few, externalizing the costs to many.
a) it is not an "article" It is an editorial and thus opinion.
b) stop taking money from taxes to subsidize installation of solar panels. My school taxes are high enough already thank you.
c) why should a private company be forced to buy and resell your product and assume all the delivery expenses?
d) why should I or anyone else be forced to pay higher electric bills just so you can sell your solar power back to the grid?
Ex: "Learn how you can sell the electricity you generate back to Georgia Power at a premium price, currently 17.00 cents/kWh."
Roosevelt once stated that this type of centralization of power in the private sector that corporations have today, could eventually lead to fascism. In some way, I don't think he was too far off.
Thank you for mentioning Roosevelt. I did a search just now and came up with his address to Congress on curbing monopolies in 1938. I think it gives me more of an idea as to the real reasons for WWII: private power versus public power.
Here is an exerpt:
Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people.
The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.
The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
It raises energy costs by using a source that is less efficient.
Efficient by what measure? BTUs? BTUs per unit of pollution? Are you accounting for ALL the costs including pollution and related effects?
End the subsidies, and let people decide what power is best for them.
Ok, then you need to end the subsidies for fossil fuels as well, both the explicit ones (tax reductions, etc) as well as the implicit ones (not paying for pollution). Right now fossil fuel users are able to dump massive amounts of pollution into the environment and thus externalize much the cost of their actions. If you want to get all libertarian about this then let's REALLY make it a level playing field and have all the costs involved on the table.
So no reduction in conventional power is possible because back-up is always needed at night or when the wind does not blow.
No reduction? Bullshit. You need standby production but they do not have to be active - inactive plants generate little/no pollution. Solar and wind demonstrably can replace a significant amount of traditional (fossil + nuke) sources. Solar and wind cannot replace the entire need but that does not make them a bad idea.
The rest of the post I'm responding to is complete troll bullshit without any credible scientific sources so I'll just ignore the anonymous troll from here.
Mass deployment of nuclear power could almost completely replace fossil fuels in half that time.
Not economically or politically possible. The risks involved with nuclear fission mean that private insurance is not going to happen so governments will have to indemnify it and that isn't likely to happen in a lot of places. Too many voters are too scared of nuclear. While reactors have become safer, they haven't been demonstrated to be safe enough to not require absurdly strict oversight. Nobody has solved the problems of waste or weapons proliferation. Nuclear is relatively safe generally but when accidents happen they can be REALLY dangerous and make large areas uninhabitable for centuries.
Technologically it fission could replace a lot of (though not all) fossil fuels but it will not happen because technology concerns are just one part of the equation. Put it this way: if you asked 100 people whether they would rather live next to a nuke plant or a coal plant, I'd lay you good odds that 90%+ would prefer to live near the coal plant even if the data showed the risk to their health was higher.
The only application which would require somewhat more work is airplane propulsion, where it's hard to match Jet-A
The "only application"? Not true, particularly for marine applications. First you have to replace virtually every internal combustion engine on the planet including those cars, power tools, some appliances, boats, ships, personal watercraft, etc. Some of those have solutions in the pipleline (cars, applicances and some tools) whereas others have no practical replacement likely in the near term. There is no practical way to power most marine vehicles with electricity. We can make a few large vessels nuclear but doing so en-mass is a bad idea on a whole bunch of levels. There is presently no electric motor replacement for an outboard motor on a smaller boat. Even if it were possible today to convert all these engines (it's not) it would still take decades if we started now for economic reasons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
an awful lot of 'retail rate' in that table
In that money was spent by the government and the end result was cheaper access to oil, can't the argument be made that it was in fact a subsidy?
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
I'm sorry, but that is an outright lie. The reason I know this is because I have family working in one of the biggest hydrocarbon power plant design and contsruction firms. They are talking about massive inflow of tenders for new plants, and old ones are NOT getting decommissioned - instead whenever possibly they are being fired up to run again.
In fact, it's so bad that after Energiewende started, Germany which had goals to reduce CO2 emissions, which it was meeting, had to give those goals up. Instead of reduction, firing up of all the older coal plants and newer ones getting started cause CO2 emissions of Germany to actually increase for the first time in many years, and this particular trend is only picking up pace. It's actually pretty hilarious to see many environmental organisations complain about this issue, when their lobbying for wind as "kinda sorta" base power and shutting down nukes is the direct cause of this occurring in the first place.
And of course reactors are still running. There aren't enough mothballed coal plants to replace all the production you'd lose. Instead they are being mothballed as older and newer coal plants that replace them come online. That's what's causing the increase in CO2 emissions in Germany.
There is a lot of problems with that. Firstly it is 3x as much according to that, not 4x. Secondly it is comparing the price to one plant, not the market. The way electric generation works is that they start the lowest cost plants, then buy off the market after that or start up the higher priced plants. You are trying to compare the price of solar to that lowest price plant, that is just idiotic. Lastly this is a Koch brother site, not exactly independent..
When you cant win, ad hominem.
And you cannot generate all the electricity from that one source, and the upgrades to facilitate the 2 way flows are footed by the consumer already. But nice ending with a logical fallacy.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
No, it was because he's refused for several decades to pay his fees, which all his neighbors have been paying, on the theory that he has a hereditary right to land that Nevada specifically ceded to the U.S. as a condition of statehood, a decade and a half before the first of his ancestors arrived in Nevada. He has been granted so much lenience that if I were some poor bastard incarcerated for ten years for having a pot stash, I'd be about ready to riot. The idea that there's some civil rights issue buried in this is hilarious.
Solar panel creation uses many toxic products, chemicals and dangerous gases, including Sulfur Hexaflouride, the MOST POTENT GREENHOUSE GAS... Is it really about the planet, or is it about money?
From Wikipedia - "According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, SF6 is the most potent greenhouse gas that it has evaluated, with a global warming potential of 23,900 times that of CO2 when compared over a 100-year period."
2002 was the last year I could find a quick worldwide sales number for SF6, 5096 metric tons. Using your factor of 23,900 and rounding up, that's the equivalent of 122 million tons of CO2 assuming every molecule of SF6 was dumped directly into the atmosphere. By comparison, in 2012, an estimated 9700 million tons of CO2 were emitted. Of course, only about 7% of SF6 production is used in semiconductor manufacturing, and only a fraction of that is solar cell production and of that fraction not all is released into the atmosphere. Cradle-to-grave estimates for all greenhouse gas emissions in grams of CO2 equivalent per kWh came in at 1001 for coal, 500 for natural gas, and 45 for solar cells.
Capture and sequestration of CO2 from burning coal would have large capital costs and increase coal usage by about 30%, putting the cost of electricity from coal right in the same ballpark as unsubsidized wind and solar.
Please do a little research and thought before you shout "ZOMG SF6 MOST POTENT GREENHOUSE GAS!"
It's safe except where it REALLY isn't. You volunteering to move in close proximity to the Chernobyl plant? How about Fukashima? I even agree with your general point that nuclear's safety record is overall pretty good but your evaluation metric isn't the only relevant one and possibly not the most important. Risk is not simply a calculation of historical outcomes but also potential future outcomes. Nuclear might be safer now but it is not clear that it will remain so. Really it would only take a small number (possibly just 1) of nuclear accidents catch up in the number of deaths caused.
I volunteer to live within 15km of any new nuclear power plant built with current technology and safety margins.
Your statement about only a few or possibly one nuclear accident catching up to the number of deaths caused by other methods of power generation is absolutely absurd. More than a million people die yearly because of accidents and air pollution caused by other means of energy production. That would mean we'd have to have 500 Chernobyls a year to come even close.
The devastation caused by the Chernobyl accident is extremely limited and even if it happened once a year, nuclear would still be WAY safer than coal.
AND: The Chernobyl accident should NOT be attributed to a failure at a power plant - the accident was caused by an insane experiment combined with faulty equipment. Without the mad experiment the had no business being run at a normal power plant, there would have been no accident.
Fukashima is the only large scale accident under "normal" operating conditions - and by "normal" in this case we have waves significantly larger than the safety margins the plant was built to withstand. A new plant would have been constructed with better safety margins, but they were good enough for approval some 50 years ago - a time when we were less risk-adverse as a culture.
And remind me again, what's the number of fatalities from Fukashima? It's the 2nd largest accident and the number of confirmed fatalities has so far stopped at 2. Estimates of long term fatalities stop at about a 1000. That's 1/1000 of last years coal fatalities.
Nuclear pollution is (thankfully) infrequent but VERY severe when it occurs. When a nuke plant goes bad it can easily make an area uninhabitable for centuries. Coal plants are pretty nasty too but not as acutely and the cleanup is far quicker in terms of human lifetimes. Neither is without its drawbacks.
Plus you seem to be forgetting that nuclear power is presently inseparable from the potential to create nuclear weapons which in turn have the potential to kill billions. Coal might slowly choke us to death but nuclear weapons could erase that deaths/TWh gap within hours. I'm not opposed to nuclear power (in fact I think it is underutilized) but let's not pretend that there are no safety issues involved. There are without question governments and political leaders who I genuinely think should be kept away from nuclear power because of the proliferation problem. Even reactors like Thorium designs which make weapons harder still don't eliminate the problem entirely.
Nuclear weapons is irrelevant. Modern plants does not produce weapons grade materials in any meaningful quantities, and even if they did - that should not stop stable democracies from implementing them. I'm not suggesting building a 1. or 2. generation plant in Afghanistan.
Small terrorist states would not be able to produce nuclear weapons capable of killing billions as you say. Worst case (and then I really mean worst case) is a single city attack - 1 - 20 million people. That fissionable material would however never come from a modern power plant in the US or Europe.
---- Sig. gone.
Well I can't speak for parent, but honestly this has been the case since political power overtook that whole tribal test of strength thing back in the days. Submit a single instance where those who held the highest concentration of resources (money, slaves, oil (crude or olive), land, etc...) didn't use them to get favorable status from those who represented the people and then we'll talk.
Yes, wealth leads to a democratically dispropotionate influence over politics. That's why it matters how skewed the wealth distribution is. The more skewed it is, the larger fraction of power will be in the hands of the few rich. Inequality in the USA is rising, and the problem did not use to be as bad as it is now. In the 70s, the United States had a significantly lower Gini coefficient (though still much higher than most European countries), but it has been rising since then:
http://www.americanprogress.or...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Inequality is also different from country to country. Again, due to the natural tendency for the rich to dominate, one expects that on average democracies with higher economic equality should be healthier. The USA does quite poorly on metrics of income inequality lately:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So I agree that the huge influence of people like the Koch brothers is not that surpising in light of the huge income inequality in today's USA. But it's still scary, and should not be taken for granted. It can be fought, and the most obvious way of fighting it is by reducing the different between rich and poor. Saying that "this has always happened" ignores that the degree to which it has happened has changed and can be changed.