EDISON DECLARES WAR ON BLACK & BROWN FAMILIES,MINORITY LAWMAKERS FIGHT BACK!

On the second Friday of October 2014, Edison Electric Institute, a trade association for utility company shareholders, met with staff members of the Congressional Black Caucus to discuss the impact of rooftop solar panels — specifically, the “net metering” policies that encourage people to install them — on communities of color. Many responded to an invitation to the meeting, but were denied entrance after being told the meeting was “for staffers only.” Brentin Mock spoke with someone who attended. Here’s the rundown:

• There were three presenters: David Owens, an executive veep for Edison; Sheri Givens, a consultant from Texas; and Florida state Rep. Joseph Gibbons (D), who’s the chair of the National Black Caucus of State Legislators’ committee on energy, transportation, and the environment. I wrote about Gibbons and the NBCSL last week.

• As expected, Owens and the others made the argument that solar net metering will make low-income African Americans’ household electricity bills go up. Reason: Since households that produce their own solar energy can zero-out their bills, poor people of color who can’t afford solar panels will have to pick up more of the costs of maintaining the grid.

• Gibbons co-signed on this argument, and presented as evidence a white paper from NBCSL called “The Need to Develop & Implement Equitable Energy Policies.” I’m told that while the report was brought up, it was not discussed at length. But Gibbons used it as proof that Edison and the utilities would really do what they are saying they are going to do, which is take out their revenue frustrations with solar rooftop producers on low-income households.

• The good news is that a good majority of the Congressional Black Caucus staffers — about 75 percent, I’m told — pushed back against these arguments during the question-and-answer period. This is significant, because it means that most of the black lawmakers in Congress are not ready to swallow the utilities’ bait as easily as so many of their colleagues at various levels of government have.

Right now, utility companies want to raise electricity charges — for the “fixed costs” of the grid, for everybody to make up for revenues they say they’re losing to rooftop solar. In Wisconsin, for example, the investor-owned utility Wisconsin Public Service Corp. wants to hike monthly feesfrom $10.40 to $25. Tyler Huebner, executive director of the pro-solar nonprofit RENEW Wisconsin, calls it a “Robin Hood-in-reverse pricing model” that “would unfairly raise bills for customers who use relatively little electricity over a year, including apartment dwellers, people on fixed incomes, and seasonal businesses.”

Many other states are proposing similar hikes, nudged along by lobbying groups like Edison and ALEC. It’s not just the usual utility suspects behind this, either. As the Institute for Local Self-Reliance recently reported, the world’s wealthiest family, the Walmart-owning Waltons, has been financing campaigns against rooftop solar through their family foundation. Reads the report, “Since 2010, the Waltons have donated $4.5 million to more than 20 organizations, including the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Americans for Prosperity, and the American Enterprise Institute, which are leading the state campaigns against clean energy.”While Walmart fights to keep the average person from getting rooftop solar they announced to their stockholders that a major deployment of solar energy systems on their stores across the U.S. and around the world. The strategic goal is to produce 100 percent of their stores’ power through renewable energy. Like the utilities they want solar only for the wealthy so they can profit from the middle class and poor.At a July 2009 Senate hearing, National Black Chamber of Commerce PresidentHarry Alford, made the case that the climate bill would cause home heating bills to skyrocket, and for African Americans and Latinos most especially. To back up his claims, he held up a report from CRA International, which represents the interest of electric utilities and gas companies. The report also claimed clean energy would cost the nation jobs. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) challenged Alford’s CRA study, pointing out that it was funded by Exxon Mobil, a fossil fuel giant that was fighting the bill. Alford’s chamber of commerce also was on Exxon’s contribution rolls, having accepted $350,000, at the time, from the oil and gas company since 1998.Alford wasn’t — isn’t — the only black voice on the take from fossil fuel energy. A few years before the climate bill, a coal lobby group called Center for Energy and Economic Development was gifting groups like the National Institute for Latino Development, the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, and Alford’s Black Chamber of Commerce with studies like this one, saying that the Kyoto Climate Change agreement would threaten the economic well-being of African Americans and Latinos.Independent studies, including reports from the Congressional Budget Office, had been showing that laws for curbing climate change and boosting renewable energy would actually save families money on their electric bills. But the fossil fuel lobbies made enough of an impression that two members of the Congressional Black Caucus ended up voting against the Waxman-Markey bill, including then-Rep. Artur Davis (Ala.), in one of his earliest signals of his eventual turn toward the GOP. Davis, of course, cited jobs and electric bills in explaining his nay vote.The players have changed somewhat today, but the game is still the same. The main player these days is Edison Electric Institute, an electric utility lobby that’s been using the voices of African-American and Latino-American elected officials to attack the spread of home-produced solar energy. They’ve zeroed in on net metering policies, which allow solar households to sell excess electricity they generate back to utility companies and roll back their electric bill costs in the process.

Utility companies are concerned that net metering its cutting into profits paid to utility shareholders. Perhaps they underestimated how quickly distributed solar generation would spread — installed solar capacity has grown 418 percent since 2010. They’re now waging war on net metering by convincing some black and brown officials that solar is the exclusive province of white, wealthy households that are being subsidized by non-solar residents, particularly people of color and the low income. Consequently, utility companies will have no alternative, they contend, but to make up for the revenue they’re losing by increasing fees in electric bills, which will disproportionately burden poor households.

Some black elected officials have simply accepted this fate for their constituents instead of challenging the utility companies, and have been echoing the utilities’ calls for increasing fees for electricity. Here’s a passage from the National Black Caucus of State Legislators report on solar net metering policies, commenting on the rise of non-utility generated, rooftop solar, or what’s referred to as “distributive generation”:The real question is will the public get it or become the Patsy's for corporate America to exploit or will black and Latina homeowners realize they are paying the cost for everyone else to live with free energy!