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New Wyoming Bill Penalizes Utilities Using Renewable Energy (csmonitor.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a Christian Science Monitor report on "a bill that would essentially ban large-scale renewable energy" in Wyoming.
The new Wyoming bill would forbid utilities from using solar or wind sources for their electricity by 2019, according to Inside Climate News... The bill would require utilities to use "eligible resources" to meet 95 percent of Wyoming's electricity needs in 2018, and all of its electricity needs in 2019. Those "eligible resources" are defined solely as coal, hydroelectric, natural gas, nuclear, oil, and individual net metering... Utility-scale wind and solar farms are not included in the bill's list of "eligible resources," making it illegal for Wyoming utilities to use them in any way if the legislation passes. The bill calls for a fine of $10 per megawatt-hour of electricity from a renewable source to be slapped on Wyoming utilities that provide power from unapproved sources to in-state customers.
The bill also prohibits utilities from raising rates to cover the cost of those penalties, though utilities wouldn't be penalized if they exported that energy to other states. But one local activist described it as 'talking-point' legislation, and even the bill's sponsor gives it only a 50% chance of passing.
The bill also prohibits utilities from raising rates to cover the cost of those penalties, though utilities wouldn't be penalized if they exported that energy to other states. But one local activist described it as 'talking-point' legislation, and even the bill's sponsor gives it only a 50% chance of passing.
Wind murders countless migratory birds every year, and the environmental impact of Chinese solar panels is similarly out of this world. There are no environmental regulations in China.
This is a good move by WY to help save the environment.
They just are trying to protect their coal industry so that it doesn't wind up the West Virginia of the western US.
The retards have really taken over, alright.
If we don't burn ourselves up, we're headed for a really nice repeat of the dark ages.
Surely, there is interstate commerce going on here, which would take the issue out of the hands of local politicians?
Also, it's anti-employment, anti-business. Renewable energy employs more people than coal. The only people to benefit are a small number of miners and a tiny special interest group (coal mine owners).
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
If this bill's author has had the temerity to claim to be in favor of 'freedom' or 'free markets'; and then pushes this nonsense, somebody needs to feed him to a wood chipper.
Now if we could just get Wyoming to also pass a bill to put up a wall around the state, then send the bill Colorado. Then they could put a dome on the wall and send the bill for that to Utah.
No walls, no gates, no windows. Must contain the tard.
as long as the CO2 from Wyoming is contained within Wyoming. They can build a dome and then suffocate if they like.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I know politicians are not very bright, and some, if not many, are corrupt, but how can they allow this to pass, especially when the alternative is coal powered power plants!
Wyoming is a major coal-producing state.
In the view of politicians, when you say "the alternative is coal powered power plants"-- that's exactly why they want to pass the bill.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Or more accurately, a backlash against subsidies - $10 per megawatt hour.
If that were the case, they'd be fining utilities for the costs of their pollution-generating injury-causing facilities that we are subsidizing by treating in hospitals instead.
They'd also apply a dollar charge for every barrel of oil that requires the Wyoming Navy to defend. Aircraft carriers don't come cheap.
Wyoming is 'America's Smokestack' - a proud title to compete with India and Northern China for honors. Sure, tourism might take a hit, but the coal dollars will continue to roll in. Another slogan they like- Coal=Jobs; well how many jobs? You've seen those huge machines digging, transporting, processing the coal ... how many humans are actually working there? In almost every case, the employers bragging about jobs or potential jobs are lying and thinking about profits and potential profits for themselves.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Or more accurately, a backlash against subsidies - $10 per megawatt hour.
It's a middle finger to progressives.
This is the problem with the political right at the moment. They're not trying to correct the market or protect local jobs, they're trying to rile up their base by pissing off people concerned about global warming.
I stole this Sig
This is Slashdot. We light hair on fire every time anybody sneezes in a way we don't like. Of course, you could always read the bill itself.
It actually does look pretty bad for renewable fuel efforts. I don't see any obvious loopholes, and it effectively imposes a tax on renewable energy by 1 cent per kWh, that the utilities can't pass on to customers. Pretty much, the only way to run a renewable energy installation in Wyoming is to pay for a nonrenewable energy facility somewhere outside the state, or make sure all of your energy is going out of the state.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
It seems like paid shills are posting under every renewable energy article about renewables not being viable without government subsidies. Well here you go. It seems that coal is now the one in need of government hand outs.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
Many decades ago, Groucho Marx posed the question "Why not Oming?". Finally we have an answer.
The currently profitable companies buy a legislature to outlaw competition.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
President Col. Sanders, beloved mascot of KFC passes an ordinary bill mandating the purchase of KFC chicken once a week. People will rejoice at this yet another natural outcome of the amendment passed during the Trump administration that relinquished the vote of the common people to the companies that are responsible for them.
I'm not a fan of solar power. It's expensive, unreliable, and lacking any kind of storage or backup power it is pretty much useless. If given enough cheap storage then any energy source looks good. Which is one thing that boggles me about those that say, "Just you wait, when we get good batteries any day now then you'll love solar power." If we had this magical battery technology then why would we bother using solar power to charge it? Wind, nuclear, and even natural gas would be better choices. They are cheaper than solar, and with a battery for load balancing they'd meet every need for power without expensive and dirty peak power plants.
I'm okay with wind. It's generally cheap when put in the right places. The problem is that with government subsidies they are not put in the right places. The subsidies are made to subsidize capacity, not necessarily output. So what happens is that windmills are put close to natural gas lines, so that the backup generators have fuel and they don't have to run a power line that isn't carrying power.
Nuclear is good. It's the safest energy source we know of, based on deaths and injuries per MWh produced. It's got the lowest carbon output, if one believes that is even a problem. It's cheap, reliable, and domestically sourced. Any law that makes building nuclear power sounds good to me.
A big problem for me though is that this messes with the free market. People should be able to choose where their energy comes from on their own. That means that not only is this bill a bad idea but so is those laws that made this bill necessary in the first place. Had they taken a gentler hand on this, by merely cancelling out the federal subsidies on these energy sources, then I could probably support it. They took it a bit far with these punitive taxes. But then this makes nuclear power look good.
I'm torn on this one.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Often the "compromise" wanted is complete capitulation so the people who see themselves firmly on the "right" can appear "strong".
Stupid fucking games instead of trying to run something properly. Edge cases on minor issues getting attention just to deliberately start a fight instead of actual governance.
In a lot of cases it's not "left" or "right" but huge fucking egos trying to turkey slap everyone just to prove they have balls.
I used quotes on "right" about because there are so many people that label themselves that way who are not really advocating for anything, they just oppose whatever they see another group doing. They are the ones pushing capitulation instead of compromise while an actual conservative is typically more interested in results than stupid fucking ego games. A conservative would allow an abortion in the case where a doctor says that otherwise both mother and baby would die, but a reactionary who is nothing but against the "left" would say "rules is rules - both die".
This is regulation of regular privately owned utilities. They're called "Public Utilities" because they provide utility services to the public, not because they're government owned.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Might try comparing say... California... to shitholes like Kansas, idiot. Red states are predominantly leeches on blue states, and they still rank the shittiest states on pretty much any quality of living/prepping for the future index. I do understand though, fucking idiots like you can't be bothered with reality.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
The Wyoming State Legislature will soon make the acquaintance of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. And after that, possibly the Justice Dept. Essentially all bulk energy transfers fall under federal, not state, jurisdiction.
sPh
Otherwise known as a "Mitch McConnell compromise". You give us everything we want, plus the transfer fee for the gaming license, and we get to go on TV and explain to our base that you capitulated.
sPh
Groupthink is rampant on the left (them being collectivists and all) and of course they brand themselves as "the caring, compassionate ones", so naturally their opponents must be evil. And when stamping out evil, well, sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do... whatever it takes, you know?
And the problem with the left is that they can't compromise and won't evolve.
Have you been sleeping the past 8 years? The right refused compromise on principle.
I was just listening to Bill Maher from last night, and all the liberals encouraging the audience to fight, disrupt, oppose, insult(*), and combat everything the right wants to do.
I didn't see the segment in question, but I'm pretty sure he was talking about Trump, a character so dangerous the GOP spent most of the primary desperately trying to stop him.
Nowhere did anyone say "we have to become better". Nothing about making better policies, making more intelligent arguments, doing things voters want, making the country better, or anything that could be considered noble.
The left talks about that constantly, a huge part of the post-election conversation is trying to understand why the left lost touch with the white working class.
But as to "better policies" and "intelligent arguments", a huge part of the criticism of Sanders was that his policies weren't robust. The right has spent the last few year using high deductibles as a major criticism of Obamacare, all the while selling high deductible coverage as their replacement.
Trump's speeches were warm and inclusive, saying essentially "we're in this together, we can win, we can do better".
"Warm and inclusive" is an odd description of mass deportation, immigration bans based on religion, promises to imprison your rival, and the constant demonization of the media.
I don't think anyone on the left has a clue how ineffective their campaign of crying, whining, and insulting is.
It can be very effective, whiny insulting campaign speeches won Trump the election.
I stole this Sig
Actually yes we are and should.
What is the alternative? Sit back and do nothing and then act shocked when it passes? How do you think stupid laws get passed? Conversely how do you think stupid laws get don't get stopped? The answer to both question is, by doing nothing.
As for the sources and motivations ... again ... without some level of "hair on fire"-ness no one will even know or be motivated to dig deeper and mobilize if needed.
Also, motivations don't really matter, execution does, so the only thing you need to "find" that is "unbiased" is the language of the proposed law. The actual text. That should be easy enough to find. Here you go http://legisweb.state.wy.us/20... One google search for "wyoming bill bans solcar" including the typo led me to the first link by for the Billings Gazette article in which the second sentence had the words "Senate File 71", A google search of that leads to the very first link pasted above.
There you go, there is your unbiased source of information.
You want to know why this matters even if "no one thinks the bill is going anywhere anyway"? Because it even exists at all !!! Legislators that waste time writing, proposing, and making others have to work and vote against it are bad legislators that should be doing actual work vice wasting theirs and everyone else's time.
If you can't be good, be good at it!
We all know what the next step is. If renewable energy is not a threat to coal powered energy, it would just die out, and we would be using coal.
But if you have to go out of your way to punish the users, you are just admitting that competing with them is not winning.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
In their view, the tax increase is more about politics — Wyoming lashing out at clean energy as payback for federal policy aimed at scaling back the coal industry on which the state has always relied.
Supporters of the tax increase say that the company is posturing — that Wyoming’s abundant winds are the renewable equivalent of its high-quality Powder River Basin coal. They point to studies showing that Wyoming eventually could provide half of the wind power in the nation, but they also emphasize that it likely will not provide anywhere near the jobs and other benefits fossil fuels have. Fully built out, the project called the Chokecherry and Sierra Madre would create fewer than 150 jobs.
They also say Wyoming doesn’t necessarily need clean energy, much less the turbines that harness it. Giant towers would line the horizon for decades to come, altering the state’s wide-open spaces more fundamentally than drilling rigs or even vast surface coal mines.
“The benefits of wind are disproportionately on the West Coast, and the costs of wind are disproportionately in Wyoming — and I mean the social costs,” said Cale Case, a state senator and economist who serves on the Legislature’s revenue committee. “This tiny reflection of the impacts back here, I think it’s just kind of a fair trade.”
Not long after it became clear that the robust winds that blow down from the Rocky Mountains and across the sea of sagebrush here could produce plenty of profit in a world that wants more renewable energy, some of the more expansive minds in the Wyoming Legislature began entertaining a lofty question:
Who owns all of that wind?
They concluded, quickly and conveniently, that Wyoming did.
Then, with great efficiency for a conservative state not traditionally tilted toward burdening the energy industry, they did something no other state has done, before or since: They taxed it.
We will examine whether the article is, beyond reasonable doubt, Fake News, to wit disinformation based either wholly on invented "facts" or upon facts which knowingly and deliberately have been constructed out of context so as to mislead or deceive the reasonable reader.
If anyone bothered to read the actual bill...
... they would find that it requires that by 2018 "each electric utility shall procure a minimum of ninety five percent (95%) of its sales of electricity in Wyoming from eligible generating resources." and that by 2019, "r 2019, each electric utility shall procure a minimum of one hundred percent (100%) of its sales of electricity in Wyoming from eligible generating resources." Eligible generating resources are defined to include (with limitation) : "Coal; Hydroelectric; Natural g
as; Net metering system, as defined by W.S. 37-16-101(a)(viii); Nuclear; [and]Oil.."
TFA claims by the headline that the Bill "forbids utilities from using renewables" which is incorrect both because hydroelectric power is properly classed as a "renewable" and because the inclusion of 'Net metering systems' does permit at least limited use of solar (and perhaps even wind) power. The text of the article below, however, makes clear that the actual claim being made is that utilities are prohibited from selling energy generated in utility-scale wind and solar farms in the state and face a $10/KWh fine should they do so.
The bill would require utilities to use "eligible resources" to meet 95 percent of Wyoming's electricity needs in 2018, and all of its electricity needs in 2019.
[I] ndividual net metering ... includes home solar or wind installations in which the owner feeds excess electricity back into the grid, and is paid a predetermined, fixed fee for the power. But these small-scale sources of renewable energy are meant for private use. They just happen to produce extra power that can be utilized by the grid.
Utility-scale wind and solar farms are not included in the bill's list of "eligible resources," making it illegal for Wyoming utilities to use them in any way if the legislation passes. [Emphasis added]
These claims accurately describe the content of the Bill
We find that the headline, taken by itself, was liable to mislead as concerns the limited use of personally generated renewable power returned to the grid. Though it is not necessary to consider the question here and despite this being a relatively minor factor, it remains possible that a charge of "clickbaityness" might be sustained against the subeditor responsible for the headline. It remains, we must note, far from what might justifiable attract the appellation of "fake news."
OTOH the journalist's text below provides a fair and accurate description of the effect of the Bill under discussion.
We find the accusation of "fake news" cannot be maintained against the article in question and would dismiss the action.