George Fitzhugh was a southern elitist and pro-slavery intellectual who famously wrote this as a rebuttal to Thomas Jefferson’s words that “all men are created equal” in our Declaration of Independence:
Men are not born entitled to 'equal rights!' It would be far nearer the truth to say, 'that some were born with saddles on their backs, and others booted and spurred to ride them,'—and the riding does them good. They need the reins, the bit and the spur…
Today, America’s elites are saddling the poor with ever more expenses in one of the greatest thefts ever. It is a massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the wealthy in the form of renewable energy subsidies that have made California, as an example, ever more unaffordable to ordinary Americans.
Robert Bryce has an excellent post out that documents the theft here. It's worth reading the whole thing, but let me just focus on a few excerpts to whet your appetite:
A devastating February 8 report from The Public Advocates Office, estimated that rooftop solar incentives in California will cost “customers without solar an estimated $6.5 billion in 2024.” The report is astonishing for its brevity and its findings. The office, which is part of the California Public Utility Commission, concluded that the cost of solar subsidies for ratepayers who don’t have solar has nearly doubled since 2021.
It explains: “The recent cost increases are driven by two main factors: (1) a surge in customers installing solar prior to the phase out of unsustainably lucrative program compensation terms, and (2) higher compensation to customers with rooftop solar for the excess energy their systems generate.” The report goes on, saying the main incentive for homeowners to install rooftop solar is a program called net energy metering which compensates those homeowners for “the electricity they generate by more than seven times its relative value to the grid.” (Emphasis added.) It continues:
“The Public Advocates Office estimates Pacific Gas and Electric, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas & Electric customers without solar will pay an additional $6.5 billion in 2024 to support the program. In 2021, the cost was approximately $3.4 billion. Our analysis estimates that in 2024, more than 15% of the average household’s electricity bill will go to subsidizing the program across all utilities if they do not have solar. The amount has trended upward in recent years: the program made up 8 to 17% of the average customer's bill in 2022, according to a prior CPUC estimate."
On January 10, less than a month before the Public Advocates Office published its report on rooftop solar, the Legislative Analyst’s Office sent a 16-page letter to Senator Maria Elena Durazo, a Democrat from central Los Angeles, that detailed the myriad ways in which California’s climate policies — in the words of The Two Hundred for Homeownership, a non-profit group that advocates for low- and moderate-income communities — “disproportionately burden lower-income people.” The letter found that the state’s net metering policies for rooftop solar:
“Have historically subsidized electricity costs for households with rooftop solar while raising them for everyone else and researchers note that NEM is one driver of high increases in residential electricity prices. The average customer without rooftop solar pays 10 percent to 20 percent on their electricity bills to subsidize rooftop solar on the homes of others. (Emphasis added.)”
None of this should be surprising. I spotlighted the class divide over solar energy and the transfer of wealth from poor to rich in 2017 in the Wall Street Journal. I wrote:
"According to a study done for the California Public Utility Commission, residents who have installed solar systems have household incomes 68% higher than the state average. Ashley Brown, executive director of the Harvard Electricity Policy Group, calls the proliferation of rooftop solar systems and the returns they provide to lucky people like me, “a wealth transfer from less affluent ratepayers to more affluent ones.” It is, Mr. Brown says, ‘Robin Hood in reverse.’
Here is my own chart illustrating how California residential electric rates have compared to the U.S. average over the last two decades:
And, here are the key facts:
California residential electric rates rose from 12.09 cents per kilowatt hour in 2001 to 28.92 cents in 2023, an an increase of 18.83 cents or 139%. The U.S. average grew by only 86%.
California's residential electric rates were 40.9% higher than the U.S. as a whole in 2001 but are now 81% higher.
California's residential electric rates have grown by an average of 0.73 cents per year compared to 0.32 cents nationally.
California's residential electric rate increases were nearly twice the rate of inflation .
It could not be much more clear. Notice, too, how California was starting to erase the difference in electric rates as of 2008, when, as Bryce explains, this happened:
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed an executive order calling on utilities to provide one-third of their power from renewable resources by 2020. "This will be the most aggressive target in the nation," he said. Increased reliance on renewable energy conceivably could hike future rates, however, because of higher production costs and the need to upgrade transmission facilities.
That’s exactly what happened, of course, and the Terminator knew it would when it signed that particular Big Green Grift. What he didn't say but also knew, of course, was that those rates would steal from poor and give to the rich, including not only the wealthiest homeowners grabbing solar subsidies, but also the solar scam artists promoting the whole damned thing. Arnold knew and he was happy to saddle up and spur California's poor with unaffordable electric rates the would say were good for them.
#California #RobertBryce #ElectricRates #RichAndPoor #WealthTransfer #Solar
Important post!
Blue collar folks are the Sherpas for the upper classes flights of fancy with phony renewables.