Bob Higgins <[email protected]> wrote: One of the states where there is an ongoing war between the electric > utility companies, the solar homeowners, and solar businesses is Arizona. > It seems to be a centroid of a lot of utility changes. I have read about > the utility companies holding private large scale cross-utility conferences > to develop a strategy to combat home sited solar. >
Yes. I think we discussed this here before. See: "Utilities wage campaign against rooftop solar" https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/utilities-sensing-threat-put-squeeze-on-booming-solar-roof-industry/2015/03/07/2d916f88-c1c9-11e4-ad5c-3b8ce89f1b89_story.html I expect the fight against cold fusion will be far more vicious. It has not yet begun, but it is inevitable. As you might expect, the Koch brothers are in vanguard of the fight against home solar panels: Legislation to make net metering illegal or more costly has been introduced in nearly two dozen state houses since 2013. Some of the proposals were virtual copies of model legislation drafted two years ago by the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a nonprofit organization with financial ties to billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch. If they live long enough to see cold fusion, I expect they will spend tens of billions of dollars to combat it. Their net worth is ~$42 billion. They will understand right away that if cold fusion succeeds, they will be bankrupted. The Saudis will also understand this. I predict that hundreds of billions of dollars will be marshaled in worldwide legislative lobbying efforts (bribes) and mass media advertising to crush cold fusion. I expect the wind and solar industries will join fossil fuels in opposition to cold fusion. . . . However, as I said, in the fight against solar the power companies do have a valid point. You cannot expect them to act as distribution grid for PV electricity for free. If PV becomes a significant fraction of all electricity they will have to start charging everyone a "toll" for use of the distribution network, even people with large PV arrays who produce a net amount of electricity more than they use. We have a similar problem with electric cars. The owners do not pay a gasoline tax, so they do not contribute to the cost of maintaining the roads. If electric cars become more widespread governments will haveto start charging a fee for electric cars. They are already doing that in Georgia. - Jed
