MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

Florida government says no to stimulating solar energy (Photo: DonkeyHotey)

Florida's state slogan - emblazoned on its license plates and welcome signs - may be "The Sunshine State," but the fossil fuel industry just got the state Public Service Commission to eliminate a household solar energy rebate program to stimulate use of the free and abundant energy source.

The sun may be a source of prodigious clean and free power, but even in a state where the sun is often hot enough to cook an egg on the hood of a car, the dinosaur polluting power companies have gotten their way. At stake were rebates to households to install rooftop solar units which would generate free - once constructed - energy that would be sold back to a for-profit utility grid. The fossil fuel giants - in this case including Duke Energy Florida, Tampa Electric, and Florida Power & Light, according to Clean Technica - lobbied the energy oversight agency in Florida and won a vote on November 25. The Tampa Bay Times writes of the triumph of greed and environmental degradation,

State regulators on Tuesday approved proposals to gut Florida's energy-efficiency goals by more than 90 percent and to terminate solar rebate programs by the end of 2015, giving the investor-owned utilities virtually everything they wanted....

Florida's utilities will go into the holidays with their biggest wishes this year, including billions of dollars in new power plants that will come online in the next decade.

The PSC, for instance, approved Duke Energy for a $1.5 billion natural gas plant that the utility wanted to replace the shuttered Crystal River nuclear plant that broke during a botched upgrade and maintenance project as well as two coal units the company plans to retire.

Although one can readily speculate that the profiteering polluters are threatened by a limitless supply of no-cost energy, there appears to be another business strategy at work here. As BuzzFlash at Truthout documented about a similar effort in Hawaii last year by a for-profit utility, use of solar panels by individual homes and buildings threatens to remove the monopoly on power generation by what are essentially public utilities that have a financial stranglehold over consumers.

If every home and business could generate their own power, electrical and natural gas companies would be faced with a decentralized community-based production of large amounts of energy. Needless to say, this would pose a possible death knell to companies that provide power via grids and gas pipelines. Down the line, these same polluting businesses may build solar farms and control the pricing and distribution of energy from the sun by pushing for further restrictions on household solar energy generation. In this way, they would, at a future point, maintain their near monopolies.

James Ayre, who wrote the column on Clean Technica observes:

The argument used by the utilities to justify the cuts was that the energy efficiency and solar rebate programs weren't cost-effective (nothing to do with cutting out competition, I'm sure) — as they argue that it's cheaper for them to produce a kilowatt of electricity than to save it.

But given that many, many other states throughout the country manage to save energy at a cheaper cost than generating it, that argument doesn't come across as very believable. But then, Florida politics have always been something of a hotbed of corruption and crime - so I'd be surprised if many in the state are all that surprised by the decision.

That means for now, the state that basks in sunshine will be at the mercy of a fossil fuel industry that is continuing to needlessly contribute to global warming and high energy costs by impeding the growth of home solar energy capture.

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