By : dailykos – excerpt
The California Public Utilities Commission decided to postpone the vote scheduled for today on its hotly contested proposal that would boost the electric bills of customers with rooftop solar installations. The proposal would greatly lower the rate of compensation utilities pay for electricity fed to the grid from owners of the state’s 1.3 million rooftop solar installations under its “net energy metering” policy. It would also charge them a big “grid participation fee.”
The voting delay is probably because the proposal—NEM 3.0—is being reworked as a result of intense public reaction. It should be. As it stands, it almost certainly would slow the adoption of rooftop solar that ought to be accelerated. If adopted, the proposal would make ripples coast to coast. As Gov. Gavin Newsom has said, more work needs to be done.
Countless celebrities, prominent officials, activists, a Republican ex-governor, and big and little media have all weighed in on the matter. Over nearly a year, the changes in net metering have been fiercely debated. However, one group never seems to get a mention. That’s the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) funded by oil and chemical billionaire Charles Koch.
ALEC has been out to throttle distributive—that is, small-scale, decentralized—energy for more than a decade. Its first target were the states’ renewable portfolio standards mandating a certain percentage of electricity be generated from renewable sources by a certain deadline. That campaign pretty much failed, so another tack was developed. Since 2012, ALEC’s renewables-busting target has been net metering. To roll it back, the council has written model legislation that seems in part to be the work of the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), an association of investor-owned utilities. What CPUC developed looks very much like that model…(more)