The Sun is owned by no one.

The American right, an assortment of libertarian advocates insist that they stand for individualism and personal freedom. They fund political groups to the tune of millions of dollars a year to confront the “Big Brother” state on behalf of the “little man”. Or so they claim. But it is all a lie. It is blantant deceit. 

A new rooftop solar system is installed every three minutes in America and soon they will be as visible on the rooftops as satellite dishes are today. This development will make many independent of the electricity grid and the utility companies. Surely, the Koch brothers and the Walton family would be celebrating this liberation for Americans from a near-monopoly of energy delivery. Alas, with the able assistance of their powerful lobbyists such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and Americans for Prosperity, they are set to do battle, state by state, across the country. Because even though solar energy still only accounts for 0.23 percent of the nation’s electricity today, rooftop solar is a real threat to the very existence of utilities in the near future.

The Kochs, whose enormous wealth rests on fossil fuels, have long been opponents of renewable energy and is cooperating with corporate interests to fight homeowners who are installing solar panels on their roofs. They are labeling people who install rooftop solar panel “freeriders,” and “freeloaders”, and are actively promoting legislation in states to charge fees, even exorbitant ones, for rooftop solar installations. Over the past few years, they’ve bankrolled campaigns against residential solar in Arizona, Kansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma and Washington.

Behind the lobbyists are the mega-rich Walton family. The majority owners of the Walmart retail chain also own several energy interests, including a 30% stake in First Solar, which makes the parts for huge commerical installations of solar panels that operate like power plants. A recent report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance shows that the Waltons are giving lobbyist organizations millions to attack renewable energy laws at the state level. Their prime targets are the homeowners and businesses that opt for solar panels to provide their own electricity.

“Rooftop solar in the U.S. is growing exponentially and more and more Americans have access to affordable solar power that cuts their energy bills and builds a more sustainable energy future," says Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth. "Yet, the Waltons’ money is instead limiting average Americans’ ability to go solar and control their own energy future.”

In Arizona, Americans for Prosperity and First Solar were successful in securing fees on rooftop solar installations for the state’s energy utilities. Initially, the utilities asked for a $100-a-month surcharge, which would have utterly destroyed any economic incentive to opt for home-generated power. But with some pushback from state regulators, a compromise was reached, and the new fees for putting solar panels on a home now come to about $5 a month. Nevertheless, rooftop installations in Arizona have dropped 40% since the compromise was reached.

Another concern is that the power companies are having their prices under-cut by these decentralized solar panel installations. Homeowners and businesses to sell back any excess electricity they create with their solar panels. The surplus electricity goes back into the power grid and is sold to other consumers at low rates, often lower than what the utilities charge for electricity themselves. ALEC is worried about how individual homeowners are being compensated for feeding electricity back into the system. When the home needs to tap into energy at night and on overcast days, the consumer often isn’t charged for the energy they use until they’ve spent all the credits they generated by selling energy through their panels. ALEC wants to reduce the rate homeowners are paid for direct power generation and perhaps even penalize homeowners for selling electricity back to the grid. While power fed back to the grid from homeowners and businesses isn’t much of a threat to utilities currently, it will be in the near future as solar installations become more popular and affordable.

The industry’s Edison Institute released a report in 2013 in which it voiced this warning:

“There is a perception that customers will always need to remain on the grid. While we would expect customers to remain on the grid until a fully viable and economic distributed non-variable resource is available, one can imagine a day when battery storage technology or micro turbines could allow customers to be electric grid independent. To put this in perspective, who would have believed 10 years ago that traditional wire telephone customers could economically ‘cut the cord?’ ”

The Edison Institute predicts that as more homes with further rooftop solar panels being connected to the grid, the price to provide electricity to traditional ratepayers will rise, and will drive even more homeowners to rooftop. At that point “it may be too late to repair the utility business model.”

Looking to the future, utilities do not so much fear consumers leaving the grid, as they do the grid increasingly becoming a network over which they have little control. Rather than being a top-down supply chain of electricity from power plants, it becomes a web of sharing between consumers and commercial energy producers across North America. Electricity will become  a shared resource as consumers barter energy credits with the utilities and one another. If everyone becomes an energy producer, it challenges and can even break the utility monopolies, transforming the system entirely. Home and business owners, as a network, will compete in an open market rising from the ashes of barren cartels. These corporations, still powerful today, foresee this doomsday scenario (for them) if they can’t rig the system to work solely for them. So those who like the Kochs and the Waltons who proclaim to stand for the free market and free competition are, in fact, insisting upon maintaining cartels.

This is why the Walton Family Trust, heavily vested in a future of immense solar arrays, with thousands of solar panels that amount to a power plant, instead of modest rooftop panels, are channeling their self-interest through corporate lobbyists. First Solar is a $6 billion corporation and the Waltons could lose their collective shirts if solar arrays turn out to be a bad investment.

The drift toward residential rooftop solar has been called a “revolution” by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. “The Waltons claim to have a deep commitment to sustainability, but their support for anti-solar initiatives tells a different story,” says Stacy Mitchell, a senior researcher at ILSR. “The Waltons are investing in efforts that both undercut clean energy and prevent average Americans from benefiting economically from solar power.” The ISLR is optimistic about a transforming market for consumers. “It’s moving the U.S. from a system in which electricity generation is controlled by a small number of investor-owned utilities and toward a future in which households produce energy and reap the financial benefits,” says its recent report.

In short, the Waltons have a product on the market, and they want to stop their potential customers from producing this product themselves. In essence, they’re calling for a tax on individuals who harvest their own energy. If the Waltons tried to tax backyard vegetable plots because they sell tomatoes at Walmart, people would start to get the idea of what's at stake here.

The ultimate goal of any electric utility to get as much energy through its network as possible. As long as those meters keeping spinning through the kilowatt hours, it’s easy money. But what happens if those meters grind to a halt, or even run in reverse. Worse yet, what if electrical customers are now providing all the electricity they need during the daytime, when demand is at a peak and prices are high. How does the electric company make up for this? And what of the expensive solar arrays, nuclear power plants, coal- and natural gas-powered plants that might become idle? What happens to them when they’re no longer in critical demand during peak usage times, especially in the summer months when air conditioners may run throughout the day?

So, if you’re the CEO of a large energy utility owner like Duke Energy, or you’re the Kochs, the Waltons or any other person or institution heavily vested in energy, you’ve got millions, if not billions, of reasons to circumvent and gut the competition. And because your chief rival is not another corporation, but millions of individual homeowners and businesses, you can’t buy them out directly, so you buy out their government representatives. In this era of Citizens United, nothing is stopping you from dispatching swarms of lobbyists to butter up or even threaten politicians to do your bidding. The right wing fetishizes the concept of the capitalist free market and emphasizes the importance of individual self-reliance. So where are they in supporting homeowners and business buying into the electricity of their choice and becoming more self-sufficient in their energy needs? Is it that many of them really don't care about these principles or has the tendency to loath anything environmentally friendly become too much of a motivating factor? Once again the oligarchs demonstrate that their goal is to privatize profit and socialize losses. The concern of people like the Koch brothers and the Walton family is that they lose profits when they do not have a monopoly on energy production and transmission to users. Capitalists always seek out a monopoly to maximize profits and always put profits over people. They are the parasites and we are the host.

Taken from this article