Considering the contribution of coal-burning power-plants to
atmospheric carbon-emissions and thus global warming, governments around the
world should be encouraging rather than discouraging home-owners to install
solar panels. That is to say, we ought not privilege the status quo when it has
contributed so much already to an uncomfortable or even uninhabitable Earth for
mankind. So it is unfortunate that energy officials in Hawaii’s government had
to step in to pressure—no, order—the Hawaiian Electric Company to approve its “lengthy
backlog” of solar applications.[1]
I submit that the officials should have gone further in correcting for the conflict
of interest in the utility. Put in the vernacular, electric companies tended at
the time to screw customers who could sell back “home-grown” solar power. The
root problem here is in the utilities’s dual roles of seller and consumer of
power.
The full essay is at Institutional Conflicts of Interest, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.
[1]
Diane Cardwell, “Utilities See Solar Panels as Threat to Bottom Line,” The New York Times, April 19, 2015.
