New Agers feeding at the porkbarrel trough

[Alan Horowitz <alanh@widomaker.com>]

Looking at page 98 of the August-September _Home Power_ magazine, I see the
publisher, Richard Perez, saying about vendors of non-solar-generated
electricity: "None of this money is billed via your electric meter, but
instead concealed in taxes or paid out everywhere from supermarkets to
hospitals." 

On page 76 of the same edition, in an article titled "The New Utility", we see
the following statement: "If all goes well in November, voters in Davis,
California will vote on implementing the first US rate based incentive (RBI)
program. As discussed in previous issues of _Home Power_, RBI programs are are
locally adopted programs in which communities assess utility bills a 1%
surcharge. The surcharge is used to purchase PV [viz., photovoltaic
solar-generated] power from participating homeowners at a premium rate. The
incentive plus the benefits of net metering [a plan in which electric
utilities are required to pay home-based electricity vendors, the full cost of
a kilowatt-hour of power, notwithstanding that the homeowner didn't pay for
the distribution losses, plant costs of the transmission grid,
untimed-to-load-demand supply, etc] should allow recovery of 90% of system
investment in 10 years."

Now, call me politically incorrect, but I say that utility bills don't get
assessed surcharges - *people* get assessed *taxes*.  I say that if it's
good for the non-solar vendors to be denounced for wanting to offload some
of their costs onto taxpayers, then the sauce is good for the solarpower
gander, too. 

I say that Richard Perez makes his living by encouraging the distribution of
solarpower hardware and services. I say that Richard Perez has a circle of
friends and business associates who are in that industry.

I say that Richard Perez has a conflict of interest. I say that Richard Perez
is a hypocrite.

I will renew my subscription to the magazine.... the non-political
articles are high quality and unmatched elsewhere. I will continue to
purchase selected items from _Home Power_'s advertisers - they fill my
needs.

I will agitate strongly against the "establishment" of solarpower (and
its lesser analogues, such as microhydro, windturbine, biomass) in the
pantheon of pork barrel empires.