Koch’s War on Renewables Bogging Down as US Heartland Wakes to Risks of Climate Change, Benefits of New Energy April 28, 2014

The biggest lease holder in the Alberta Tar Sands is not Exxon or Shell, it’s the Koch Brothers.

Sons of John Birch Society founder Fred Koch, the two brothers are no longer just a hobbyhorse for lefty blogs – their pursuit of personal profits over humanity, nature, and the planet itself is now the subject of examination by major news outlets.

Koch fingerprints are all over the right wing media frenzy over militant racist deadbeat Cliven Bundy and his camo-clad nutcase followers. That’s not the only disappointment for the Kochs of late.

NYTimes:

At long last, the Koch brothers and their conservative allies in state government have found a new tax they can support. Naturally it’s a tax on something the country needs: solar energy panels. For the last few months, the Kochs and other big polluters have been spending heavily to fight incentives for renewable energy, which have been adopted by most states. They particularly dislike state laws that allow homeowners with solar panels to sell power they don’t need back to electric utilities. So they’ve been pushing legislatures to impose a surtax on this increasingly popular practice, hoping to make installing solar panels on houses less attractive.

– But the Big Carbon advocates aren’t giving up. The same group is trying to repeal or freeze Ohio’s requirement that 12.5 percent of the state’s electric power come from renewable sources like solar and wind by 2025. Twenty-nine states have established similar standards that call for 10 percent or more in renewable power. These states can now anticipate well-financed campaigns to eliminate these targets or scale them back. The coal producers’ motivation is clear: They see solar and wind energy as a long-term threat to their businesses. That might seem distant at the moment, when nearly 40 percent of the nation’s electricity is still generated by coal, and when less than 1 percent of power customers have solar arrays. (It is slightly higher in California and Hawaii.) But given new regulations on power-plant emissions of mercury and other pollutants, and the urgent need to reduce global warming emissions, the future clearly lies with renewable energy. In 2013, 29 percent of newly installed generation capacity came from solar, compared with 10 percent in 2012.

The utilities hate this requirement, for obvious reasons. A report by the Edison Electric Institute, the lobbying arm of the power industry, says this kind of law will put “a squeeze on profitability,” and warns that if state incentives are not rolled back, “it may be too late to repair the utility business model.” Since that’s an unsympathetic argument, the utilities have devised another: Solar expansion, they claim, will actually hurt consumers. The Arizona Public Service Company, the state’s largest utility, funneled large sumsthrough a Koch operative to a nonprofit group that ran an ad claiming net metering would hurt older people on fixed incomes by raising electric rates. The ad tried to link the requirement to President Obama. Another Koch ad likens the renewable-energy requirement to health care reform, the ultimate insult in that world. “Like Obamacare, it’s another government mandate we can’t afford,” the narrator says.

Washington Post:

But the campaign — despite its backing from powerful groups such as Americans for Prosperity — has run into a surprising roadblock: the growing political clout of renewable-energy interests, even in rock-ribbed Republican states such as Kansas. The stage has been set for what one lobbyist called “trench warfare” as moneyed interests on both sides wrestle over some of the strongest regulations for promoting renewable energy. And the issues are likely to surface this fall in the midterm elections, as well, with California billionaire Tom Steyer pouring money into various gubernatorial and state and federal legislative races to back candidates who support tough rules curbing pollution. The multi-pronged conservative effort to roll back regulations, begun more than a year ago, is supported by a loose, well-funded confederation that includes the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and conservative activist groups such asAmericans for Prosperity, a politically active nonprofit organization founded in part by brothers David and Charles Koch. These groups argue that existing government rules violate free-market principles and will ultimately drive up costs for consumers.

– But the strong winds that blow across Kansas have carried new interest groups into the state. Kansas ranks sixth in the country in wind output, which jumped by a third last year and equaled 19 percent of the state’s electricity, the EIA says. The growing number of wind farms not only generate power but royalties for landowners. Dorothy Barnett, executive director of the Climate and Energy Project, said that Kansas landowners receive more than $13 million a year. “This issue is an issue that touches rural Kansans, and we have a lot of rural Kansas legislators,” she said. Wind proponents cite manufacturing jobs, too. At a plant in the state, Siemens is making nacelles, the automobile-size units that contain wind-turbine gearboxes and electronic control equipment, for the biggest turbine order ever for wind farms in Iowa. Supporters of repeal had trouble making the argument that the renewable-energy mandate had raised electricity rates by 40 percent, as ALEC asserted. The Kansas Corporation Commission reported that the rate impact of renewable-energy standards was about 0.16 cents of the 9.2-cent retail cost of electricity per kilowatt hour. It said that meeting the requirement “requires less than 2 percent of the revenue requirement of the utilities while supplying more than 10 percent of the generation capacity in the state.”

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Eventually, the Kansas Senate passed two bills, one postponing the renewable targets and one repealing them. Both failed in the state House, although the bill’s backers have vowed to bring them back.

Fred Abels in Des Moines Register:

Iowa has been a leader among the states as America has grown into a global clean-energy leader, with the potential to go even further. Today, there are 80,700 wind energy jobs and 142,698 solar energy jobs across the nation. Construction of turbines, solar panels and associated parts has led to a manufacturing boom in a number of states. This level of investment also provides new sources of revenue from property taxes. In the case of wind farms, that figure can come out to $189 million annually to a local county tax base. This new income for rural communities means more resources for fire and police departments, schools, infrastructure and other public services. Great stories abound. Farmers Electric Cooperative in Frytown, Ia., has started moving on a project that would be the single largest solar farm in Iowa, if not the Midwest. The 750 KW solar project would provide all of the energy for two local organic and all-natural agriculture businesses that are served by the co-op. The cooperative has also committed to using U.S.-made parts for the project, feeding the renewable energy economy. Besides creating local, renewable energy, efforts like this one help bring new economic opportunities to small communities. Renewable energy is a drought-resistant crop that helps grow communities, with average land-lease payments of $10,000 per turbine each year for landowners. Wind and solar energy have grown rapidly in recent years and brought a bright future with it. A clean-energy economyand agricultural solutions can provide a one-two punch to climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently released its fifth assessment report (http://ipcc.ch/report/ar5/), which reaffirms that without adaptation, increased temperature, frequency of extreme events and reduced water supply would result in productivity declines in major North American crops and pose a threat to global food security. FRED ABELS lives and farms near Holland, Ia. He participated in the discussion on climate change hosted by the Center for Rural Affairs and Bethesda Lutheran Church in Ames on March 30.