Policy Makers Paid to Hold Consumers Hostage on Energy

Who doesn't want to reduce the amount of their electric bill, increase the value of their home, protect themselves against rising energy costs and remove billions of metric tons of global warming pollution from ever being produced? The answer is: your elected officials. 

The jury is in on solar power, but our elected representatives won't tell you that because they have neither the will nor the skill to stand up to the power brokers who decide when and what source of energy will be used to power our future.

Power company boardroom members and our elected officials are quite comfortable lying to Joe-public about how hard both are working to transform the way America gets its power. What CEOs and their legislative counterparts are actually doing about the future of power in America is making sure it stays in the same hands it has been in for the last hundred years.

There is not one power company executive that has dreams of customers getting half of the power they need from renewable sources; unless of course their company owns the source. Industry specialists will go to great lengths to convince the public that going solar – as well as transforming to other renewable energy sources – isn't as easy as it may seem. Not true.

A report published by Environment America, Star Power: The Growing Role of Solar Energy in America, states that enough sunlight strikes the U.S. every year to power the country 100 times over. Producing 10 percent of our electricity from solar power would reduce America's global warming pollution by 280 million metric tons in 2030, the equivalent of taking 59 million cars off the road.

The report also stated that "The life cycle water consumption of solar photovoltaics is 1/500th of the lifecycle water consumption of coal power plants and 1/80th of that of natural gas plants, per unit of electricity produced. This is just some of the overwhelming economic and environmental benefits available today, should states adopt aggressive solar programs. 

Here in Florida, industry executives and regulators have successfully worked together to keep Floridians from investing in solar power. Florida's Public Service Commission has gone as far as approving "pay-forward" programs that have customers paying added cost (beyond their monthly electric cost) to pay for the construction of two nuclear power plants.

Hundreds of millions of customer dollars are caught in limbo because Duke Energy refuses to give customers back revenue paid-forward to rebuild a nuclear plant in Crystal River. The deal went belly-up when costly errors dominated the project. The plant was also set to receive billions in grant dollars and low-cost loans from the federal government, to take the proposed plant to completion.

What is it going to take for the citizens in Florida to wake up and stop the utility fleecing by the state's mega-billion-dollar power industry? We are the "sunshine state," yet states like Massachusetts, New Jersey, North Carolina and New York have all out-paced Florida when it comes to the number of roof-top solar panels. We can thank our elected officials for their carefully constructed laws that prevent residents from going solar. We can also thank the Florida Power & Light and Duke Energy dollars that pay for those lawmakers campaign.

One of those laws prevents solar power companies from leasing roof-top units to Florida homeowners. This process takes the initial cost to the homeowner away – for the equipment and installation – guaranteeing the affordability and savings.

The cost of solar was out of reach for those not able to invest up front and wait to recoup the savings. Florida laws have prevented many solar companies from setting-up shop in the state for fear of a controlled market place – this in a state that supposedly prides itself for its free market principals.

Shortly after President Obama took office, he announced that the federal government would supply over $20 billion in grants and low interest loans to promote the construction of future nuclear power plants. Between $5 and $6 billion was targeted to assist FPL and Progressive Energy (now Duke Energy) for two plants to be built in the sunshine state. How Duke's withdrawal from building the Crystal River plant changes that is not yet clear.

What is clear is that placing two solar collectors on your roof is likely to save the average home $50.00 a month in electricity cost. Right now, not someday, the two panels, one reversible meter and the installation of them will cost around $5,000. Include a solar hot water heater ($1,000 installed) and that adds another $20 a month in savings.

Just one of those billion dollars slated to aid nuclear power could equip 200,000 homes with cost saving hardware; reducing the utility cost to the residents of those homes by $10,000,000 a month or $120,000,000 a year. In solar dollars, that translates to $1.2 billion a year in savings to the American people – not oil companies and foreign countries.

Encased in the solar cost is the employment of a thousand jobs along with the economic stimulation that comes with them. Neither a pipeline nor a nuclear power plant come close to the number of jobs solar offers. And what isn't included in a solar program is total land destruction from uranium mining, mega billions in gallons of water it takes to build and operate a nuclear power plant and all of the other environmental damage that continues to plague them.

The proposed Keystone XL pipeline comes with a cost of $8 billion just to build it; change-orders, right-of-ways and other anticipated consequences are bound to drive the cost well past the $10 billion dollar mark. It to could also be an accident waiting to happen; and it would be sitting on the country's largest aquifer. The pipeline would also pump the dirtiest of the dirtiest oil. 

Nuclear power has an even larger waste problem, one that will surely cost (should we ever find a way to responsibly dispose of it) more than the astronomical price tag of building the plants. And if we don't; there is already enough nuclear waste to poison every drop of water on earth, it's possibly just a few earthquakes away. 

It is time to pull the plug on the literal power-brokers who have been fleecing the residents of Florida. It is time to hold our elected officials accountable for what they support and what they don't. It would take a much longer article to address all the perils that are part of the nuclear and carbon-based energy programs, but the only foreseen danger that follows solar around is the rising unemployment numbers. Let's put people to work building clean energy.