dooley conservatives for energy freedom
debbie not cal
....there were no subsidies involved, McDonald said. As Georgia Power, the largest subsidiary of Southern Company, has expanded its solar capacity, solar farms have been built and operated by other companies through competitive bidding, helping to keep costs down, Edge said.
"It's market driven," McDonald said. The state has "lots of good, flat land," plenty of sunshine, and interest rates were low, making solar investments more affordable. The initiative was carried out as solar technology was advancing and prices for solar panels were falling, he said. "It was like a perfect storm."
McDonald, a former state lawmaker whose current term on the commission won't expire until 2020, said he still supports coal, nuclear and natural gas because they can run 24 hours a day, but he said solar offered an opportunity to help diversify the state's energy mix.
With the cost of solar power in Georgia dropping from 13 cents per kilowatt-hour to below 4 cents in the last five years, McDonald said he expected continued growth in a way that moves "slowly and methodically."
[graph]
Georgia reached No. 8 in the Solar Energy Industry Association's 2016 national rankings. And last year, at No. 9, it was producing enough electricity from the sun to power about 175,000 homes. Before 2013, Georgia didn't have much solar power at all.
Solar is still less than 2 percent of the state's electricity generation mix—almost all of it utility scale—so there's plenty of room to grow.
Georgia Power spokesman John Kraft said that compared to distributed, rooftop systems, "utility scale solar is currently the most cost effective, and these large-scale installations provide the most value for Georgia Power customers." But he also said the utility does offer customers programs to support rooftop solar.
Renewable energy "plays an important role in the diverse generation mix we use to serve customers," Wilson Mallard, director of renewable development for Georgia Power, said in a written statement. The company, he said, will continue to make sure every renewable energy project "helps us keep energy reliable and affordable."
An Unusual Alliance: Sierra Club + Tea Party
The gains of the last five years were made in part because people who are not normally political allies have worked together, or at least rowed their separate boats in the same direction.
Just a few years ago, critics, utilities and elected officials were saying solar power was too expensive and the state was too cloudy, recalled Sierra Club's Georgia Director Ted Terry.
Lauren 'Bubba' McDonald, Jr., chairman of Georgia's PSC
"I give a lot of credit to Bubba (McDonald)," Terry said. "He actually went to Germany, where it is cloudy, and found how they were deploying solar without as much (sun) as in Georgia," he said. "When he sees something that's working, he's going for it. He sticks with it."
Dooley, whose Green Tea Coalitionand out-of-the-ordinary views have drawn a lot of national attention, helped persuade the commission to expand solar in the state.
"You respect each other's differences and you understand everybody has a right to believe what they believe, and you focus on what you have in common," Dooley said.
The Big Lift: Getting the Legislature to Help
Success with a five-member commission is one thing. Moving the state's conservative legislature toward new policies that encourage rooftop or smaller-scale distributed solar will be a bigger political lift.
"Historically we have not had solar-friendly policies," said solar business owner Don Moreland, chair of the Georgia Solar Energy Association. He described fighting for pro-solar legislation as "a long slog".
But that slog sometimes pays off, and Georgia in 2015 joined more than two dozen other states in allowing third parties to finance limited-sized solar systems. Its Solar Power Free-Market Financing Act of 2015 was passed with support from a broad coalition of electric utilities, environmental interests and others. With this business model, homes and businesses are allowed to host solar panels installed and operated by a solar provider and, though long-term contracts, get some of their benefits without having to pay the up-front costs or maintenance.
Dooley, who in 2016 helped defeat a utility-backed measure in Floridato limit rooftop solar power, argues that the nuclear plant backlash in Georgia could open new opportunities for more coalition-building and more compromise to advance solar power.
"A lot of people are looking at it and wanting solar and renewable energy as a way to provide some kind of competition," she said. "A lot of Tea Party activists don't like monopolies at all."
Dooley wants to buck conservative doctrine and persuade the legislature to boost financial incentives for residential rooftop solar.
Even as utilities in other states try to claw back net metering policies, she wants Georgia lawmakers to make sure people with rooftop solar get a "fair market rate" for the extra electricity their solar panels produce.
Lawmakers should also make sure homeowners and businesses can sell electricity generated by their solar panels to their neighbors, she said. And she thinks electric cooperatives need to be told they must be faster connecting privately owned solar panels into their systems.
The Solar Message for a Conservative State
"It's all about the message," Dooley said. "Free market, competition, choice, expanding the energy portfolio and energy mix. I don't want excessive regulations."
Some lawmakers might be receptive to her arguments. But they're monitoring the political winds and watching Plant Vogtle.
"I wasn't a big supporter of solar, but the economics have drastically changed," said State Sen. Chuck Hufstetler, a Republican from northeast Georgia who chairs the Senate Finance Committee and has been critical of the nuclear plant's financing.
He echoed Dooley in saying Plant Vogtle's problems have voters looking for other energy choices and acknowledged he's thinking about introducing legislation with implications for solar power.
Terry, with the Sierra Club, said he's optimistic about solar in Georgia.
Solar technology continues to improve, he said. He noted that Atlanta is expected this month to spell out how it intends to get all its electricity from clean fuel sources by 2035, likely giving solar another boost.
"It's just a good time to be in this space," he said. "There is so much happening with this technology."
PUBLISHED UNDER:
NATIONAL ENVIRONMENT REPORTING NETWORK - SOUTHEAST
...That film was mocked and dismissed by climate deniers. For instance, an editorial in the *Wall Street Journal*, written by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of atmospheric science Richard Lindzen, argued that Gore falsely claimed there was scientific consensus around the reality of climate change. We’re currently observing the spectacle of Republicans in Congress fighting tooth and nail to sink President Obama’s Clean Power Plant proposal, even going so far as to suggest to governors that their states break the law to defy the federal government and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
So when you find Democrat Al Gore on the same side of an environmental issue as a far-right Tea Party leader, it’s eye-opening. But left and right are coming together over the issue of distributed solar power and the right of homeowners and businesses to install rooftop photovoltaic solar panels.
That shared interest was highlighted this week when Gore spoke at the Bloomberg New Energy Finance conference in New York this week back-to-back with Debbie Dooley, a national Tea Party activist, chairman of the Atlanta Tea Party and founder of Conservatives for Energy Freedom.
But while Gore has focused on the climate impacts of dirty energy and the need to switch to clean energy sources to prevent global catastrophe, Dooley ignores climate change altogether to focus on individual freedom and the “free market.”
“She is an activist for solar energy and decentralizing the grid, working with conservatives across the country who believe expanding renewable energy markets and customer choice are consistent with free-market principles,” says her bio. “She believes our nation is in the midst of a clean-energy revolution that unites grassroots activists from the left and right.”
An article in Bloomberg News called Gore and Dooley a “political odd couple” and noted that Dooley never mentioned climate change in her presentation, focusing rather on consumer choice.
“Solar equals independence—solar equals freedom,” she said, using a favorite Tea Party word. “Tea Party activists don’t like strong centralized units. There’s nothing more centralized than a utility, than the government telling you what power to buy. This is a battle that we will win. I am literally floored with the response I have been getting from conservatives with the right message.”
Gore had a startlingly similar message.
“People want their own opportunity to shape their own future, and renewable energy is part of that,” he said. “There is a war on solar with these legacy utilities, and coal companies using their historic political power, campaign contributions and lobbying to pass the most ridiculous laws and tax the people who want to put solar panels on their roof.”
Dooley’s activism began when she joined forces with the Sierra Club to prevent Georgia Power from billing customers in advance for two nuclear plants projected to have huge cost overruns. She also helped fight off an effort by Georgia utilities to charge owners of rooftop solar an extra fee on their monthly bill, something utilities, backed by conservative groups like Americans for Prosperity, are pushing around the country. Currently, Dooley is one of the leaders of a battle in Florida to protect and expand the ability of homeowners and businesses to generate their own rooftop solar and sell it to their neighbors, bypassing big utility companies. The effort isengaging both conservative and liberal environmentalists.
“They have a lot of policies in Florida that actually effectively block the sun,” Dooley told Yale Environment 360. “So you have the Sunshine State that has policies put in place by these powerful utilities to stifle competition, and I just felt like something needed to be done.”
“We’re going to work together to accomplish something,” she said. “Those on the left believe in climate change and coal’s bad. Those on the right don’t like government-created monopolies— we believe in free-market choice and national security. It doesn’t matter what your reasons are, as long as we work together to accomplish a common goal. That’s all that matters, and we’re much more successful when we’re able to do that.”
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
Al Gore at SXSW: We Need to ‘Punish Climate-Change Deniers’ and ‘Put a Price on Carbon’
Tea Party Members and Environmentalists Join Forces in Support of Solar Energy
4 States Where Solar is Under Attack by Koch-Funded Front Groups
2/15
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/green-tea-party-solar
The solar-energy business is booming.The average cost of installing solar panels has dropped by half since 2010, and a new solar electric system is now installed somewhere in the United States every four minutes. The growth extends well beyond the rooftops of American homes and small businesses; last week,Apple announced that it is investing in an eight-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar solar farm in Monterey County, California,which it says will power its operations in the state by the end of 2016. Although solar is still small, supplying less than one per cent of the country’s electricity, its growth has alarmed the energy industry’s old guard—coal, oil, and utility companies. Working primarily through conservative advocacy groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which lobbies at the state level, and Americans for Prosperity (A.F.P.), which was founded by Charles and David Koch, the billionaire industrialists, this coalition is doing its best to weaken the nascent industry, particularly rooftop solar. In a curious twist, however, ALEC and A.F.P. have found themselves butting heads with—and even losing battles to—tough-minded, pro-solar branches of the Tea Party.
Debbie Dooley was one of the twenty-two organizers of the first nationwide Tea Party protest, in 2009. A preacher’s daughter from Louisiana, she is a co-founder of the Atlanta Tea Party, on theboard of directors of the national Tea Party Patriots, and, since 2012, has been a fierce solar-power advocate. “I thought that the regulated monopoly in Georgia had far too much power,” she told me recently, describing the dominant utility company in her state. “They had begun to look out for the best interests of their stockholders instead of their utility customers.” Solar, she said, promised to give people energy autonomy. “The average person cannot build a power plant, but they can install solar panels on their rooftop, and they should be able to sell that energy to friends and neighbors if they wish.”
Dooley led a fight to persuade Georgia’s all-Republican utility commission to require Georgia Power to buy more of its energy from solar sources. A.F.P. fought back, sometimes in ways that Dooley found troubling. “They would put out completely false information,” she told me. Through mailers, mass e-mails, and Twitter, “they said that adding solar would cause disruption to the power supply and your household appliances. Electricity would be forty per cent higher! I don’t think they were really expecting me to go after what they were saying as forcefully as I did. I just ripped them to shreds over not being factual. We won that battle.” (A.F.P. did not respond to repeated requests for comment.) That was in 2013. Dooley had teamed up with the Sierra Club to form the Green Tea Coalition. Later, that coalition helped defeat an effort by Georgia Power to impose heavy fees on customers with rooftop solar systems.
Dooley and her environmentalist partners have tacitly agreed to disagree about many things, starting with climate change. “That’s something we don’t get involved in,” she said. “If you mention climate change, they’re going to tune you out.” She meant her Tea Party compatriots, of course, with whom she emphasizes, when she talks about solar energy, the free market, consumer choice, and national security. “Rooftop solar makes it harder for terrorists to render a devastating blow to our power grid,” she said. “There’s nothing more centralized in our nation.If terrorists were able to take down nine key substations, it would cause a blackout coast to coast.”
Utility companies are not wrong to fear rooftop solar. Its popularity, if unchecked, will certainly cut into their profits and, perhaps, into their budget for maintaining the electrical grid. Hence an ALEC campaign, [G UK link]revealed by the Guardianlast winter, to promote legislation to penalize individual homeowners who use rooftop solar and tolabel them “free riders.” This effort is part of a broader campaign against renewable energy—solar, wind, biomass—that ALEC, whose leading members include such fossil-fuel giants as ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy, has been conducting for years. In 2012, according to the Guardian, “The group sponsored at least 77 energy bills in 34 states,” many with the goal of blocking renewable-energy efforts and weakening clean-energy regulations. The model legislation developed by ALEC in this area is called, of all things, the Electricity Freedom Act.
Solar is prospering in spite of these efforts, and not only among wealthy liberals in California. According to the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, the majority of solar-equipped households in New York and Massachusetts are located in neighborhoods with a median income of between forty and ninety thousand dollars. A recent study by researchers at Yale and the University of Connecticut found that socioeconomic and demographic factors like income, party affiliation, and the unemployment rate had little influence on the spread of residential solar-power systems in Connecticut between 2005 and 2013. The main factor that seemed to drive whether a household installed such a system was whether a neighbor had recently done so.
In Georgia, thanks in part to Dooley’s efforts, the State Senate is likely to pass a bill that will make rooftop solar easier and cheaper for residents to install. (The House just passed it unanimously.) “Georgia is the new sunshine state,” Dooley told me happily. When we spoke, she was driving to the old sunshine state, Florida, which has notably limited options or incentives for solar investors. Dooley is helping lead the launch of a major ballot initiative that would amend that state’s constitution to allow individuals and businesses with solar panels to sell the power that they generate directly to their tenants or neighbors. (Current law permits only utility companies to sell electricity.)
Floridians for Solar Choice,the group behind the initiative, is an inchoate alliance of libertarians, Christian Coalition conservatives, liberal environmentalists, and eighty-five Tea Party groups—Dooley’s people. They need to collect seven hundred thousand signatures by next February to get the measure on the ballot the following November. The stakes in Florida are high, and Dooley and her colleagues expect substantial resistance from the utility companies and their allies. Last fall, however, a Republican pollster found that seventy-four per cent of Floridians support the goals of the ballot measure. “I’ve got other states saying, ‘Please help us,’ “ Dooley told me. “But Florida is ground zero.” [got beat by 60 plus and alford crypto competing proposition]
==