(Stephen) Moore’s “Law” Fails When Facts Are Fake

By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent

If you have followed conservative political thought at all over the past 30 years, you’re familiar with Stephen Moore. Currently a senior fellow at the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, Moore has been around since he was the president of the anti-tax group Club For Growth (which is not, as it is often mistaken for, a hair replacement club).

Now at the Heritage Foundation, his voice resonates with far greater reach and allows him to land his particular free market gospel at places like Creators.com, which is where I found his most recent screed, “How Solar and Wind Mandates Tax the Poor and Middle Class.”

As i started reading the piece, fully ready to be wowed by the intellectual rigor and argument from someone at the Heritage Foundation, what I found instead was a bunch of repackaged gobbledy gook – think my infamous “zombie lie” writ large – seasoned with a dash from Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand that exists only in the fever dreams of market absolutists and ignored inconvenient facts about what he lovingly refers to as subsidies.

Let’s dive right into to this poorly argued mess, shall we?

[wds id=”3″]

Out of the gate, what Stephen Moore wants you to “know” is that solar and windpower is expensive. So central is this fake “fact” to his argument that he uses the word “expensive” explicitly twice in his second paragraph, where he begins his argument by saying the renewable portfolio standards (which he refers to as “renewable energy standards,” but are the same thing) force utilities to purchase “expensive renewable energy” and “expensive solar and wind power.”

This assertion contains no facts to back it up – it’s just baldly stated as if it were a truism. One marvels, then, at the most recent report from the Solar Energy Industries Association that insists that utility-scale solar – you know, solar built and run by utilities – has been the biggest boom segment of the industry. Moore would argue that it’s the result of RPS’s that they are building these solar farms and that, without the mandate, they’d just keep merrily building fossil fuel plants and burning through coal and oil as if there were no tomorrow.

Except that, of course, the opposite is true. They are building solar farms because they are actually the least expensive option in a lot of states and may soon be the least expensive option nationwide. Utilities are choosing solar over more expensive fossil fuel and nuclear plants – they aren’t being forced to to do it. And they’re passing those savings on to their customers.

So having set up the strawman of “expensive renewable energy,” Stephen Moore proceeds to beat it with the “zombie lie” of the cost shift, saying utilities are increasing rates on non-solar customers because of the expense of buying solar energy.

Sigh. I don’t mind having to fight with these people, but could they at least come up with some original arguments now and then. Sheesh.

As we’ve discussed ad nauseum, the solar “cost shift” doesn’t happen until at least 10% of a state’s electricity comes from solar power, something that is occurring in only five states. That leaves 45 states where Moore’s argument is a flat-out lie, and in the five remaining states, the “cost shift” is fractions of a penny per kilowatt-hour. So this idea that somehow utilities buying solar is a tax on the middle and lower classes – the heart of Moore’s brainless argument – is laughable.

Finally, and this is where I literally chuckled out loud, Stephen Moore ends his piece by talking about how is solar and wind are so good, why can’t they compete without mandates and subsidies? Let’s let the market work, people, he says.

To which I respond – you first. The day the fossil fuel industries give up their subsidies is the day solar should give up its subsidies, and not a moment before.

The bottom line is this – solar is becoming increasingly competitive with fossil fuels, and there is a day coming when solar+storage (another development Moore seems to have never heard of) is going to displace fossil fuels throughout the United States. And guys like Moore are going to be sad – but you know what? Making Moore sad is a perfectly reasonable outcome from where I’m sitting.

More:

How Solar and Wind Mandates Tax the Poor and Middle Class

SEIA, HBCU To Partner With Aim Of Diversifying Solar Workforce

By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent

On the year anniversary of releasing its first-ever diversity report, the solar industry’s largest association – the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) – announced it is partnering with the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Community Development Action Coalition (HBCU-CDAC) to improve the industry’s recruitment efforts in minority communities.

During Solar Power International last year, SEIA and The Solar Foundation released the findings from its diversity survey, a hard and honest look at where the industry stood in terms of reaching non-traditional solar audiences like blacks, Hispanics and other minority communities. It also looked at how the industry treats women – and discovered the answer to the question of how the industry treats women was “not that well.”

In fact, the group that performed least well in the survey were women of color – and that is one of the inequities SEIA is trying to solve.

SEIA and the HBCU-CDAC, have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to begin a comprehensive effort to help the solar industry recruit and employ more students from the nation’s 101 Historically Black Colleges and Universities. This will include hosting a national jobs fair, individual jobs fairs at the HBCU schools and bringing solar companies to campuses for recruitment.

[wds id=”3″]

“Diversity and inclusion is one of our highest priorities and, while we’ve made progress, we still have a long way to go to make the solar industry more accurately reflect the diversity of the communities we serve,” said Abigail Ross Hopper, SEIA’s president and CEO. “Those of us in solar joined this industry because we want to make the world better for all, which is why we’re excited to partner with CDAC, tap into the talent at HBCUs, and bring more of these students into our growing industry.”

I’ve been involved in diversity efforts in other industries, but never before have I seen an industry take such concrete steps to address the problems they found. I’m impressed with this first step, and I, for one, am looking forward to seeing how this program works toward improving the diversity of this industry as it gets implemented.

No Bridge Necessary: Solar+Storage Cheaper Than Natural Gas In Southwest

By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent

According to a report from Bloomberg, natural gas is going to run into significant price competition from solar+storage in the coming years – perhaps even eliminating the need for new natural gas plants in parts of the American Southwest.

The report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance advances a story SolarWakeup has been telling you about for months, which is that new natural gas-fired plants are increasingly being seen as unnecessary as the costs of solar+storage, especially at the utility-scale level, continue to come down.

Prices are so low, in fact, that Bloomberg predicts solar+storage will replace nearly 7 GW of coal-fired generation in the region – but that’s not all.

[wds id=”3″]

This won’t be contained to the Southwest,” said Hugh Bromley, a New York-based analyst at BNEF in the article. “This is spreading and will continue to spread.”

Bloomberg offers the following example:

For example, a 100-megawatt solar farm that goes into service in Arizona in 2021, coupled with a 25-megawatt storage system with four hours of capacity, will be able to provide power for $36 a megawatt-hour, according to BNEF. That’s well below the $47 price from a new combined-cycle gas plant, according to the report.

This finding mirrors what’s going on already in California and Arizona, where public service commissions (in Arizona called the corporation commission) are already looking askance a utility requests for new natural gas plants. In the past, utilities have relied on natural gas plants to fuel their electrical grids once the sun goes down, but with battery storage coming into significant usage, natural gas is increasingly obsolete.

In California, the Public Utilities Commission has become far more unwilling to allow its utilities to build or fix natural gas plants and is insisting far more often that they produce grid support through the use of solar + storage instead. And in Arizona, the Corporation Commission told Arizona Public Service (the state’s largest utility) to throttle back its plans to build 5.3 GW of natural gas plants in its latest integrated resource plan and instead resubmit it with more renewables (read: solar) in it.

Energy storage is the key.

California Universities Set Aggressive Renewables Path: 100% By 2025

By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent

The state university system of California just took the aggressive renewable energy goals set at the state level and turned them up to 11. The University of California system is committed to reaching its own goal of being powered 100% by renewable energy by 2025 – 20 years before the entire state’s deadline of 2045.

The announcement is in parallel with the system’s intent to become carbon neutral the same year. According to the release, the California universities’ system has already saved $220 million with its energy efficiency programs, and continues to leverage the benefits of its solar farm in Fresno, the largest solar purchase of any university in the United States.

[wds id=”3″]

“From LED lighting to all-electric fleets, we are proud of the countless energy efficiency and clean energy actions we have taken to tackle climate change,” said David Phillips, UC’s associate vice president of Energy and Sustainability. “These ambitious new targets, which align with those of our student environmental leaders, will ensure that our electricity comes from clean sources, extending UC leadership in modeling sustainability solutions.”

The systems new goals go far beyond just increasing renewables, however. Among the related goals are:

Clean energy: In addition to its 100 percent clean energy commitment by 2025, UC will endeavor to reduce its energy-use intensity (energy per square foot per year) by 2 percent year over year through more efficient measures. By 2018, the university’s own power company will provide 100 percent clean electricity to participating UC campuses.
Green buildings: No new universities’ buildings or major renovations after June 2019, except in special circumstances, will use on-site fossil fuel combustion, such as natural gas, for space and water heating.
Sustainable procurement: UC will use its market power to drive the availability of more sustainable products and services. Examples of new goals include 25 percent green spend and 25 percent economically and socially responsible spend. Enhanced requirements for its procurement departments and new standards for their suppliers will further support sustainable sourcing.

As usual, California is leading the way, and in this case it’s the students leading the charge. It makes one almost take stock of the future and not freak out. Almost.