Net Metering is a pricing program for government, the private sector and the consumer markets all to promote and accelerate investment in renewable energy, specifically solar. It lets homeowners and businesses generate their own electricity from the sunlight that hits their property, use what they need, and sell the surplus back to their utility electrical grid. State-by-state it’s been implemented in patchwork style, with versions that differ depending not so much on the available sunlight or the technology, but from politics.
You’d expect Florida to live up to its name as “The Sunshine State”, but Florida lags behind Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Utah, Vermont, and even West Virginia in producing solar-generated electricity. The state obstructs distributed generation by defending its utilities’ monopoly on buying and selling electricity. A developer of apartments or offices can't sell electricity from rooftop array on his own buildings to tenants. Innovative business models that permit a third party to build and own an array on a private home, and then to sell that power at a discount to the homeowner--models that have been proven in wide use across the country--aren’t permitted in Florida. The financing hurdles limit the financing, making rooftop solar available mostly to people who can buy the hardware out-of-pocket, so Florida is sitting under a hurricane of dollars every day and only a few thousand people are allowed to collect it for themselves. The rest have to buy their electricity from the utilities.
Which appears to be what the utilities want.
The election is complicated Amendment 1. The Florida press has revealed what appears to be a pro-solar, pro-net metering amendment as a Trojan horse law, promoted by a front group called Consumers for Smart Solar but supported behind the scenes by the Florida Power & Light, Duke Energy, the Koch Brothers, et al. Amendment 1’s ostensible purpose is guaranteeing the rights of Floridians to “own or lease solar equipment installed on their property to generate electricity for their own use." That’s legally unnecessary--they already have that right. The real agenda is to “ensure that consumers who do not choose to install solar are not required to subsidize the costs of backup power and electric grid access to those who do." That wording permits legislators to characterize net metering as some consumers unfairly subsidizing others, and to kill the idea, temporarily at least, as happened in Nevada.
Republicans are the party you can find reliably behind this kind of shenanigans, which makes no sense if they want to call themselves “conservative” by any measure. First, it’s surely conservative to help a homeowner who wants to improve his property, which solar does. Second, it’s surely conservative to promote thrift and economy in home ownership and building management, which solar does. Third, participation with as many choices in a market is what capitalism’s for, and net metering does that. Promoting waste, dependency, lack of choice and monopolism are (aren’t they?) precisely what sound capitalism and conservatism isn’t supposed to do. The cost of generating a watt of electricity with solar technology has fallen from over $75 in 1977 to well under 74 cents in 2016 (it’s still dropping), so the GOP has to ask itself how it can be a party of the future when it’s futilely doing all it can to resist it. And finally, in an era of elevated consumer understanding the sheer political cost of such an open betrayal of your own constituents is so short-sighted that it can only damage the reputation of the party and its candidates. That’s happening in Nevada as well.
The negative disclosures around Amendment 1 in Florida night not be enough to keep it from winning, but if that happens, the win will be costly and likely short-lived. It has helped galvanize pro-solar Floridians from both major parties who want this issue decided on its merits, not by political donations and shadow organizations. It’s also helped to undermine the GOP’s credibility with its own voters. If the GOP wants Florida to go blue, this is how to do it.