Electric Power Companies Move To Impose Fees on Solar Energy Users — Searching for Ways to Soften the Blow of Losing Customers

Photo by Tim Fuller.

By Kiley Kroh
Wherever he goes, Mark Richards has people coming up to ask his opinion, expressing their frustration and concern.

“I’ve never seen such a hostility from residents as I have on this issue,” said Richards, partner at Woods Cross, Utah-based InterMountain Wind and Solar. “I’m amazed at the intensity I’m seeing.”

The cause of all the uproar? Utah’s main utility, Rocky Mountain Power, has proposed a new fee on its residential solar customers. While solar users make up a small percentage of RMP’s customer base — only about 2,000 people — that number is growing quickly and the prospect of paying an additional $4.25 a month is not sitting well with residents and solar installers.

Utah’s fight is indicative of a rapidly escalating tension: As rooftop solar becomes more and more mainstream, driven largely by middle class customers, utility companies across the country are looking to soften the blow to their business model by charging solar customers a monthly fee.

On the surface, it’s a heated debate over the immediate value of solar power — who pays, who benefits, and how to make the situation equitable — but the core issue is really the increasing likelihood that distributed generation sources, like rooftop solar, will completely upend the traditional utility business model.

Mike Rossetti, a resident of Draper, Utah, took the decision to invest in solar power very seriously. A little over four years ago, inspired by his wife and the tech companies he’s worked for that have made serious investments in renewable energy, he studied for an entire year and ultimately did his own solar installation (with the help of an electrician, he adds).

Rossetti has been thrilled with his decision to go solar and thinks any Utah resident who wants to do the same should have that opportunity — something he worries is jeopardized by an additional charge on solar customers. “When I heard about this net metering fee I got very concerned because the four and a quarter over a 25 year lifespan would really make a hefty chunk of a person’s investment,” he said. While Rossetti has a large 24 panel array, he recognizes most people have a much smaller system, meaning the additional charge would be an even bigger blow.

Read More

The Killer Frackers: There's a Sudden and Extreme Spike Dying Newborns in Eastern Utah — Where There's A Drilling/Fracking Frenzy

Photo by J.K. Califf.

By Dr Brian Moench
Donna Young is a midwife in Vernal, Utah, with 20 years experience managing home births in Idaho and Utah. She lives in the Uinta Basin, the heart of the fossil fuel drilling/fracking frenzy in Eastern Utah. On May 8, 2013, she had her first stillbirth. At the funeral service a few days later, she noted what seemed like an extraordinary number of infant graves with recent dates at the cemetery. She decided to investigate.

She didn't get any help from local authorities, but eventually information gleaned from obituaries and mortuaries revealed 12 cases of neonatal mortality (most of them stillborn, or death shortly after birth), in 2013. Looking back to 2010 revealed a modest upward trend, but then a huge spike in 2013. This is sparsely populated rural Utah. Vernal is a town of fewer than 10,000 people. But per capita, this is a neonatal mortality six times the national average. It is actually worse than it appears. National infant mortality rates have been dropping slowly and steadily for almost 50 years, including about a 10 to 15 percent drop in the last decade. Furthermore, most of Utah is about 50 percent Mormon, so the rate of drinking and smoking is less than the national average throughout the state. The minority population in rural Utah, like Vernal, is very low, and the percentage of Mormons is even higher, both of which should lower the infant mortality rates, all other things being equal

What is going on in Utah's Uinta Basin to explain newborn babies dying? An abrupt surge in teenage mothers, drug, alcohol use? No evidence of that. Is there a genetic explanation? Genes don't change that quickly. Is there a sudden onset of medical incompetence by the area's health-care providers? No reason to think so. That leaves one other possibility. Is there something happening in the environment? As a matter of fact, yes.

Major cities with pollution problems have either high ozone, like Los Angeles, or high particulate pollution, like Salt Lake City, depending on the time of year. But the Uinta Basin has both simultaneously, making it unique and the most polluted part of the state. Studies suggest that the two may act synergistically to impair human health. Add to that high levels of the by-products of every phase of the oil and gas fracking extraction process - diesel emissions and hazardous compounds like benzene, toluene and naphthene, and you have a uniquely toxic air pollution brew in Vernal.

Read More