Imagine making 14 percent post tax profit with no competition in a captured market, on electricity service, over 4 times what some other utilities make? That's the pleasure of being Xcel Energy in Colorado. And right now they aim to protect all that by laming Colorado's net metering policy, the nation's best policy for rooftop solar, the power generation that can be owned at the household and which lowers peoples' power bills so much.
It's one thing to allow a company to make a fair return on investment, it's quite another to let that monopoly turn your state into the company's cash cow moving to destroy the growth of distributed generation and the local ownership it entails.
In Germany, the world center of distributed generation, small operators like families and farmers own 10 percent of the entire nation's power generation, an astonishing accomplishment and an integral part of how they acheived 20 percent renewables on the grid.
The US was founded, in large part, on the goal to break loose of monopoly powers. And with solar modules getting rapidly more affordable, we now have the means to push back against utilities owning all of power generation, a huge market sector. We should fight to change the utility business model from one of selling a commodity through centralized generation to one of providing a wide variety of services to go with distributed generation and a broad base of ownership in this critical market sector.
Xcel's attack on net metering makes us confront the question: Who should own solar generation when the monopoly model is losing favor, and when this monopoly in particular is protecting embarrassing profits?
Please read my article on how Xcel is making new investments in its own solar generation while simultaneously attacking the kind of solar you and I can own. Share with friends in Colorado and anywhere that rooftop is being eyed by big utilities. This battle is going far and wide.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...