It sounds ridiculous. Imagine if a customer buys a vegetable your farm grows says they should have the right to force you to buy vegetables they grow in their garden at full retail price from them. Not the price you get, the full retail cost.
You’d laugh. You have tractors and employees and materials. Liabilities. Even more ridiculous, you helped give them the money for the land they used to grow the vegetables.
Welcome to California, where the government forces utilities to do just that. And poor people pay the price.
Yet the anti-science activists will win. Not because it is foretold in the astrology that environmental group employees are 400 percent more likely to believe in, but because this is just a political dance; performative environmentalism at the expense of poor Californians that Democrats know won’t vote Republican anyway – but will be told to blame Evil Corporations.
In reality, California utilities are controlled by the state. Ignore the populism of politicians claiming utilities are greedy, Pacific Gas & Electric is the problem, and all that nonsense. All 10 rate increases that SMUD and PG&E and the other government-controlled utilities got in the last few years was because California government forced them to keep subsidizing solar and wind.
Poor people, or those who rent, or who don’t one single-family homes, are forced to pay 100 percent more for energy over the last 10 years so wealthy people in Malibu can not only get free electricity when the sun shines, they can get paid just as much as PG & E charges at times when they produce an excess. Whether the utility needs it or not. Like in March, when no one is using air conditioners to cool or furnaces to heat. The utility is still buying it and paying twice as much as if they’d bought it or generated it.
The problem became that America’s second most anti-science state (Hawaii is actually even whackier) kept paying more people to add solar, believing that costs would plummet. They did not plummet.(3) It isn’t just that solar panels are at alarming risk of early failure, it is that subsidies and mandates keep prices high. Old people, who spent $1 a minute for a long-distance phone call and in today’s money $3,500 for a Coach class plane ticket when government controlled those industries, know government control is bad.
These sue-and-settle arrangements are also not new. In California, government education unions are even told to sync their strikes together. Teachers picket for 10 days, government pretends to cave in and give them a 20 percent raise, all while student enrollment is declining, and the higher cost us passed along to the public.
Likewise, this newest effort by environmental groups is political theater. The settlement – keep the status quo – with the government agency that controls energy prices is pre-arranged.(4)
But no one watches theater to get right to the ending, so we have to pretend the Appeals court will have to decide to hear the case where Californai government decreed that new solar installations would only get wholesale cost, not full retail, for energy they ‘sell’ back to utilities. We have to pretend a court in San Francisco – the city all predatorts file in when they want to make supernatural claims like that plants are tiny green people and therefore a weedkiller can cause cancer, and get a jury to agree – is going to side against environmentalists, when in reality this was determined in advance.
If it was not prearranged, the lawsuit would not have been filed. Yes, sometimes environmental groups do file lawsuits and lose(5) but that’s rare. And there is too much money at stake for them to risk, so it is not conspiracy theory to plainly state that this was settled for before trial but, like teacher strikes, people need to see the dance to believe.
Activists will win because they got Democrats to include in Section 2827.1 of the Public Utilities Code that the government must insure “customer-sited renewable distributed generation continues to grow sustainably.”
All they have to do is suggest that people might not install solar power unless they can be paid back at full retail and the court must side with them.
Doesn’t that undermine activist claims that solar is working and taking over the world and America is being left behind if we don’t make everyone pay 100 percent more the way California and Germany do? Not at all, because the law does not work that way.
In court, if you are accused to stealing a cow, you can simultaneously argue that you never stole the cow, you gave the cow back, and it was your cow in the first place. That is called pleading the alternative.
Coupled with pre-arranged outcomes, it is unbeatable. Only poor people get defeated.
NOTES:
(1) So filled with hate for science they tried to force a Louisiana landowner to tear down a forest and put up a new one for a frog that lives in a small area of Mississippi.
(2) So filled with hate for science and the poor they reformat USDA data on pesticides each year to claim normal food is “dirty”, while exempting their organic industry clients. Even though the most popular organic pesticide, copper sulfate, is far more toxic to humans. Except exempt because when President Clinton, the most Anti-Science Boomer of them all, forced USDA to create an Organic seal he also forced USDA to exempt any products that a trade group panel said should be exempt; even if the product is in no way organic.
(3) Except a lot more left than the Democratic party today, which has become all about free trade and never stopping homicidal death cults in places like Iran.
3) If you pay people to prop up an industry, it only stays as long as the subsidy does. That is why taxpayers who had no choice about paying for a solar farm in the desert will continue to pay for it. Government gave the owner the money, government forced PG&E to sign a contract, and when it was still unviable a decade after being touted as affordable, clean energy, government told PG & E to cancel the contract so government could force them not to cancel it, and keep the existing contract, and pass along the cost to customers.
And blame the federal government’s environmental rules. You know, the Trump administration.
(4) These sue-and-settle arrangements are not new. In California, government education unions are even told to sync their strikes together. Teachers picket for 10 days, government pretends to cave in and give them a 20 percent raise, all while student enrollment is declining. The cost us passed along to the public.
(5) We are 2-0 against Center for Biological Diversity, after an effort that even bureaucrats at the Obama administation’s US Fish and Wildlife Service, knowing they were complying with the law while being unable to give us any Freedom of Information Act information that was useful, were impressed by.