Antinuclear

The drive by energy utilities to stop small scale solar power

The goal of utility companies, on the whole, is to work to ensure that a new model of decentralized renewable energy distribution does not emerge. 

It’s an issue of the private good versus the public good: profit vs. what benefits the public commons and life on earth

Monopolistic Utilities Know Renewable Energy Will Cut Their Profits, So They Stall It  MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT, 31 Dec 13 There’s one overwhelming dirigible-size reason for-profit (and often monopolistic) utility companies — that transmit and sell most of America’s energy — generally discourage, if not crush, residen ial solar (and other renewable) energy: fear of large scale loss of profit……..

for-profit utility companies were dragged kicking and screaming into the concept of allowing renewable households and industries to sell their excess energy back via transmission lines (known as hooking up to the grid). Why might you ask would a for-profit utility company be against households or industries becoming so successful in renewable energy that they are generating excess power?

Simply put, for every household or industry that becomes self-sustainable with renewable energy, the for-profit utility loses a customer, which is the same as saying losing profit.  For every renewable house or industry that uses net-metering to send excess energy over the transmission grid of the utility, the utility is losing both a customer and weakening its energy monopoly.

The primary and ossified model of electric utilities is centralized monopolization of energy transmission (which again only relatively recently has been challenged through both consumer and “electrical energy buyer” lobbies — which is another issue largely unrelated to renewables). Furthermore, as “Solartopia” author Harvey Wasserman notes, the utilities are members of the same industrial fraternity as the fossil fuel and nuclear plant generators — sometimes doubling up as in the case of utility-owned nuclear power plants.

The goal of utility companies, on the whole, is to work to ensure that a new model of decentralized renewable energy distribution does not emerge.  If it did, the for-profit utility companies that get their way in so many state legislatures, not to mention favors from the federal government, would become extinct.

Their only hope to survive in the longterm is to monopolize the power grid long enough to build renewable energy sources that they own and distribute — and only, for the most part, when they run out of fossil fuel (if the earth is still around) — and that do not come from external sources such as solar-equipped businesses and homes.  Only a few utilities have begun to understand this and start weaning themselves off of fossil fuel, but in the meantime they need to keep homes and businesses from independently establishing renewable electrical cooperatives — and the way to do that — they think — is to stop current customers from converting to independent renewable energy.

That’s the story, whatever shills for the industry or technocrat electrical engineers might say. It’s an issue of the private good versus the public good: profit vs. what benefits the public commons and life on earth……  http://truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/item/18391-for-profit-utility-companies-residential-renewable-energy-as-their-ruin

December 31, 2013 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized