Solar barrier bill reveals leanings

The article “Debate heats up over solar-power bill” on Feb. 23 showed how our state legislators have sided with Big Energy and against citizens, townships, schools, hospitals, etc., in proposing new law to take away payment for excess energy produced by solar panels. Their argument was that this shifts costs onto other users who do not have solar panels.

The big lie of omission in this argument is that they never credit the owners of solar arrays for the cost savings that they have brought to all customers by building their own power plants instead of making everyone pay to build new ones (which would undoubtedly be powered by dirty carbon fuels). And if you don’t get what I’m saying, just look at the solar panels on any neighborhood home and realize that it is a micro power plant that you didn’t have to pay for. Look at the large arrays that hospitals, schools, and municipalities have built and realize that those are power plants that you did not have to pay for.

While extreme weather events during winter might cause a surge in demand on occasion, everyone who lives with Arkansas heat knows good and well that summer is the time with the most severe weather events that drive us to the peak of capacity and strain the grid. Every one of those home and business solar installations is lessening the burden on the grid so that everyone can keep the air conditioner going. If your utility has to go shopping for additional power on the free market during these events, they are going to be paying a premium price that will be passed along to all customers.

We’ve all been around long enough to see our electric utilities pass out free low-energy light bulbs to customers. They conduct free home energy audits and provide fixes to make homes more energy-efficient. Do they do this out of the goodness of their hearts? Of course not — they do it to drive down demand for energy because it costs so much to build new power plants. Now we’ve got a real movement in this state of owners building their own solar power plants and the utilities are trying to shut them down because they can’t make any profit off the power they didn’t generate themselves with the help of their Big Energy carbon fuel-selling friends. Our legislators grovel at their feet and sell out the rest of us.

The bill passed out of committee with our dishonest legislators claiming they had compromised on some of the terms to make it more fair. That’s like being robbed at gunpoint and being told that you can keep a dollar out of your own wallet. This bill pretty much shines a light on which of our representatives are working for us, and which are working for Big Energy.

TROY JUZELER Bentonville