The Koch Brothers’ Dirty War on Solar Power
This would be the best long read you could pick this weekend, and party affiliation doesn’t matter, this makes everyone angry.
But in recent years, the nation’s IOUs have been abusing their monopoly powers to profit from massive infrastructure projects. Utilities more than doubled their capital expenditures last decade; costs were paid for by electric customers, whose power bills have soared nearly 40 percent. For investors, the formula is simple: More infrastructure equals more profit.
The rise of distributed solar power poses a triple threat to these monopoly gains. First: When homeowners install their own solar panels, it means the utilities build fewer power plants, and investors miss out on a chance to profit. Second: Solar homes buy less electricity from the grid; utilities lose out on recurring profits from power sales. Third: Under “net metering” laws, most utilities have to pay rooftop solar producers for the excess power they feed onto the grid. In short, rooftop solar transforms a utility’s traditional consumers into business rivals.
The surge of solar competition has caught the nation’s dirty-power generators flat-footed: The utility trade group Edison Electric Institute (EEI) warns that rooftop solar could do to the utility industry what digital photography did to Kodak, bringing potentially “irreparable damages to revenues and growth prospects.”