Fighting the Big "Environmental" Industry

On the political front here in Utah, I spent the past month continually commuting or phone conferencing to/with Salt Lake City for work on three separate but related fronts – a Renewable Portfolio Standard, Net Metering, and Interconnection – all three dealing with “Alternative Energy” sources (but mostly solar.) This has been a particularly busy season since the Utah legislature is currently in session. The problem is that the big “environmental” industry (notably GE and Honeywell) who bought into the existing alternative energy (mostly solar and wind) technology have gotten impatient with their market share (less than 3%) and decided to legislate themselves some more equipment sales. Unfortunately for them, their power prices are about twenty times the going rate here in Utah, which makes them unattractive. Unfortunately for us, Utah’s governor is such a flaming radical (if he weren’t so independently wealthy, thanks to his daddy, I’d say he’d been bought off by the big environmental industry) that he’s willing to betray all of Utah’s rate payers and create our own version of a Soviet-style command economy (like in California) and force us to buy from these snake-oil salesmen (most of whom are lobbying with grant money from the DOE – your and my own tax dollars – talk about being hoisted on your own petard.) But Utah isn’t alone or even the first battle state – these same battles have already been fought and lost in 24 other states, including Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, Texas, California, Washington, and Oregon. It’s been nearly a full-time job to try to protect our citizens from this travesty – and for whatever number of battles that we’ve won, I’m not convinced that the war is over; it’s like watching a bad horror movie – every time you think you’ve killed the Boogieman he just gets back up and starts chasing you with a big chainsaw again. It’s good to be involved in the political process a bit, however frustrating. And speaking of frustrating, I’ll save you all my rant about the national political scene – suffice it to say that I’m (literally) having nightmares about the upcoming energy and food shortages as the present and future governments continue to wreck our economy – I’m rapidly becoming an anarchist.