If politics makes for strange bedfellows, few issues make for more peculiar sleeping arrangements than that of distributed energy. There aren’t many others that put former Republican congressman (and son of “Mr. Conservative” himself) Barry Goldwater Jr. on the same side as the Sierra Club.
.. The conflict scrambles political loyalties because it goes back to competing visions from the beginning of electrification. When Thomas Edison drew up the plans, the electrical grid was envisioned as a highly decentralized affair, with small power plants in each neighborhood. But with the advent of alternating current, it became possible for much larger plants to supply power over great distances.
.. They face competition from Consumers for Smart Solar—allied with Americans for Prosperity—which has submitted its own ballot measure for 2016 that uses similar-sounding language but would in fact codify the existing practice whereby homeowners can only sell excess power back to the utilities themselves. Major Florida utilities Florida Power & Light, Tampa Electric, Gulf Power and Duke Energy have contributed nearly $2 million to Consumers for Smart Solar.
.. But net metering schemes tend not to acknowledge that the price of electricity reflects not only the cost of generating the power but also the cost of building and maintaining the grid. Reimbursing homeowners at the full retail rate of electricity acts, effectively, as a subsidy.
.. The situation is roughly analogous to electric cars not paying for road repairs via the gas tax. A few electrical cars are fine, but what happens when most cars on the road aren’t paying?
.. Ultimately, what scares utilities most about distributed generation is the danger it poses to their monopoly over electricity generation. Shielded from competition for more than a century, utilities regard any technology that moves the grid back toward a more open and decentralized system as an existential threat.