ANNOUNCEMENTS
1.) The monthly
Center-Right Coalition Meeting in Las Vegas will be held this Thursday. Featured presentations by Assembly Brent Jones on the “Contract with
Nevada” and Danny Tarkanian,
candidate for the 3rd congressional district.
Meeting is open to all Citizen Outreach “Charter” and “Silver
Circle” members. For membership
information, CLICK HERE
2.) There will be a
tele-town hall this Thursday evening, August 20, at 6:30 pm Pacific for members
of the “We Decide Coalition” featuring Nevada State Controller Ron Knecht who will discuss his
companion tax repeal referendum targeting the gross receipts tax. Dial-in information will be provided on Thursday
before the call.
Citizen Outreach “Charter” and “Silver Circle” members are
invited to participate. For membership
information, CLICK HERE
3.) While it is
pretty much non-political, Citizen Outreach also runs the Nevada Marketing
Association. Activities have been pretty
much dormant for the last two years – only so many hours in the day – but I’ll
be dusting it off and making what will be a pretty exciting announcement about
a new project with my compadre, Alan
Stock, in the next couple of weeks.
If you’re a business owner, entrepreneur, sales
professional, marketing manager or just someone who wants to own your own
business some day, you might want to sign up for our email list now so you’ll
be among the first “in the know” when we launch. CLICK HERE
NET-METERING FOR DUMMIES: EXPLAINING THE ROOFTOP SOLAR
SCAM
(Chuck Muth) - Because
of the unrelenting cries of anguish emanating from the rooftop solar industry
about how Big Bad NV Energy is trying to kill 6,000 solar industry jobs, maybe you’re
thinking you should try to learn something about the brouhaha.
But then every time the term “net-metering” is mentioned
your eyes glaze over like a Homer Simpson donut.
Yes, it can be complicated.
But not if you think about a $4 cup of Starbucks coffee. Let me ‘splain…
If you purchase a rooftop solar system, the system will
allow you to make your own electricity so you won’t have to buy it from NV
Energy. The problem is, you can only
make your own electricity when the sun is shining bright on your solar
panels.
Until battery technology advances further, you’ll still have
to buy electricity for your home from NV Energy for nighttime use and cloudy
days. Still, you won’t have to buy
electricity for daytime use, so your NV Energy bill will be significantly less.
So here’s what should be the simple question: Will I save
enough money by making my own electricity during the day to cover the cost of
purchasing and installing a rooftop solar system. And the answer to that is…probably not. The cost of a rooftop solar system is so
expensive that it probably doesn’t make financial sense.
Enter Big Government.
“Green” liberal environmentalists are hell-bent on forcing
everyone to give up cheap, plentiful, dependable fossil fuel energy and switch
over to “clean” renewables…no matter how much it costs!
As such, the government decided to subsidize the cost of
purchasing rooftop solar systems – using taxpayer dollars to make that which
makes no financial sense make financial sense at taxpayer expense.
This makes expensive rooftop solar systems affordable, at
taxpayer expense, for folks for whom rooftop solar is not affordable.
Do you see how screwed up this is making the market already
before we even get to “net-metering”?
Now to explain net-metering, let’s get back to our $4 cup of
Starbuck’s coffee. (Disclaimer: I “stole” this analogy from a friend who knows a heckuva
lot more about this issue than I do.)
Let’s say you go to Starbucks every morning and buy a $4 cup
of coffee. But then one day the
government starts a program that subsidizes the purchase of a commercial-grade
coffee maker in your home. You buy one
and, as such, no longer need to buy your $4 cup of coffee from Starbucks.
But here’s the thing: Your new coffee maker makes more
coffee than you drink every morning. So you have a bunch of coffee left over.
Of course, common sense way to look at this situation is
that you’re saving $4 day. And if you
make more coffee than you need, oh well.
Use it or lose it.
But that’s not how the government sees it.
The government wants people to buy these new
commercial-grade home coffee makers. So
here’s what it does: It passes a law that says Starbucks has to purchase the
extra coffee that people who buy these new home coffee makers generate.
Whoa, whoa, WHOA!
They can’t do that, can they?
Well, they can if they’re the government.
Of course, ours is a kind and compassionate government
(yeah, right), so it won’t force Starbucks to buy every last drop of extra
home-made coffee that you brew. Instead,
it sets an arbitrary limit: Starbucks only will be forced to buy the first 235
gallons of extra home-made coffee generated by the new coffee-makers.
But of course, since this is the government we’re talking
about here, we have to make it even more complicated, as well. Just for fun.
So instead of forcing Starbucks to pay you directly for your
extra coffee, Starbucks is forced to issue you a “credit” for each cup of
unused coffee you “sell” back to the store.
And those credits can be used to buy Starbucks coffee if and when you
find yourself in need of buying theirs instead of drinking yours.
So even though Starbucks neither needs nor wants to buy your
extra coffee, the government has passed a law forcing them to do so.
But instead of getting cash for your unused and unwanted
coffee, Starbucks is forced to give you, essentially, a gift card that you can
use to get free or reduced Starbucks coffee whenever you find yourself in a
position of not wanting or having your own home-made coffee.
That, folks, is “net-metering.”
People with rooftop solar systems generate more electricity
during the day than they can use. And
the government has passed laws forcing NV Energy to buy up to 235 megawatts of
home-made electricity from rooftop solar homeowners even though the utility doesn’t
want it or need it and can generate the same electricity cheaper.
But instead of paying for the electricity directly, rooftop
solar customers get “net-metering” gift cards which they can use to pay for the
electricity they use at night when their rooftop solar systems are completely
useless.
Look, if you want to save the planet and save yourself some
money during the daytime by installing a rooftop solar system on your house,
vunderbar.
But taxpayers shouldn’t be subsidizing your purchase of your
rooftop solar system any more than taxpayers should subsidize your purchase of a
commercial coffee maker. And NV Energy shouldn’t
be forced to buy your extra home-made electricity anymore than Starbucks should
be forced to buy your extra coffee.
If you don’t want to lose that unused electricity, then call
Tesla and tell them to hurry up and develop an affordable home battery
system. In the meantime, get off the
Public Utility Commission’s (PUC) back.
FIND OUT WHAT YOU MISSED!
Don’t be a Low Information Voter. Find out what the libs and the RINOs wish you
didn’t know. Here’s what you missed in
yesterday’s edition of Chuck Muth’s Silver
State Confidential e-newsletter…
- The Queen Bee “turd in the punchbowl” who isn’t playing nice with the other kids in the tax repeal referendum sandbox
- Why no one will ever mistake Mark Hutchison for Donald Trump…and it’s not the just the hair
- How the rooftop solar crybabies are like illegal aliens
- What Democrats found at the bottom of the Who Other Than Hillary barrel
- Another outrageous PC victory against the Confederacy
- Harry Reid, Dina Titus and Barnabas Collins walk into a nuclear repository…
- Brian Sandoval’s newest economic development “trophy wife”
- 2 new conservative candidates join the 2016 RINO Hunt
For a limited time, you can get a FREE subscription
to Silver State Confidential (value:
$120.00). Just go to: www.SilverStateConfidential.
“When I want to know what is really happening in Nevada
politics I read Silver State Confidential.”
- Michael
Clifford, MD of Las Vegas
No comments:
Post a Comment