01/16/2022 – Santa Rosa Press-Democrat
‘Doing our part’
EDITOR: Dave Stein reduced home-based solar generation to costs (“Solar power costs,” Letters, Wednesday). He misses one of the basic reasons many of us did invest in solar: to reduce greenhouse emissions. It is the same reason we invested in insulating the attic, installed energy-efficient windows and doors and a geothermal heat pump and use nothing but energy star appliances.
Granted we’re fortunate that we could do this, but it did take years of budgeting and a game plan to achieve what we hope will be an enduring contribution to society by doing our part. Reducing this effort to a cost-based analysis is exactly what the “investor” model of “public” utilities wants. It was all done with PG&E’s encouragement and using every incentive they, the county and the state provided.
It feels like a betrayal to have been encouraged to invest in our green energy production and then be penalized by a shamed and mismanaged for-profit corporation like PG&E and other entities that back this new plan. Yes, we consume, and yes, we cogenerate to offset the carbon dioxide mix of our power.
JOHN SERGNERI
Petaluma
And this morning in the New York Times:
Schwarzenegger: We Put Solar Panels on 1 Million Roofs in California. That Win Is Now Under Threat.
Critics of these rooftop solar incentives — mostly investor-owned utilities — contend that net metering leads to higher electricity rates for California homeowners who can’t afford to install solar and for apartment dwellers by shifting the costs of operating and maintaining the power grid to them. They also contend that California needs to move from incentivizing solar to incentivizing battery storage.
California should do more to incentivize clean energy in lower-income areas. And the state should be promoting the installation of a million batteries to store the energy that the solar panels capture. That’s how we can truly democratize energy. But adding a tax and removing incentives will hurt the solar market, and making solar more expensive for everyone does nothing to help our most vulnerable.
California has been hit hard in recent years by the changing climate, with record droughts and catastrophic wildfires. That’s another reason this proposal makes no sense; we should be pulling out all the stops to slow global warming. California is already so far behind on meeting its 2030 climate goals that the state isn’t projected to hit them until 2063. And our 2050 goals? We are on track to reach them by 2111.