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"It is obviously a potential threat to us over the long term," Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers told Bloomberg earlier this year. "If the cost of solar panels keeps coming down, installation costs come down and if they combine solar with battery technology and a power management system, then we have someone just using [the grid] for backup."This doomsday forecast gained traction in January with the release of an industry white paper that offered a surprisingly frank assessment of the threat renewables pose to the utility business model. The report, published by the Edison Electric Institute, predicted that, in the absence of immediate industry action, renewables could soon cause "irreparable damages to revenues and growth prospects" of utilities.These new solar firms view government-sanctioned utilities monopolies as outdated and ripe for disruption.
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This graphic shows the boom in photovoltaic installation in the US, with more than 1500 MW installed in the first half of this year. Via SEIA
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Interestingly, this pro-innovation, anti-corporate stance has resonated with a broader swath of libertarian conservatives, for whom the fight over renewable energy is not about climate change, but rather an individual's right to produce his or her own energy . While conventional wisdom suggests that conservative opposition to clean-energy subsidies and/or global warming denial will undercut bipartisan support for solar, a growing number of libertarian-minded conservatives — including some hardcore Tea Partiers — have set aside those concerns in order to achieve the long-term goal of getting government out of energy distribution entirely."From a conservative, or libertarian, perspective, it raises the question of why are we giving these guys a monopoly when they don't need it anymore?" said John Farrell, a senior researcher with the Minneapolis-based Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which pushes for distributed generation. "We can generate electricity in lots of different ways. We don't need a big centralized corporate entity to generate electricity. We can do it ourselves."The result has been a strange grassroots coalition that has united technologists, environmentalists, and libertarian activists in favor of solar power. So far, this ragtag group is winning, mounting effective counterattacks against utilities' attempts to weaken net metering.In Idaho and Louisiana this summer, state regulators responded to populist backlash by voting to uphold net metering, rejecting proposed changes by local utilities companies. In Georgia, a group called the Green Tea Coalition united to force utilities to get more of their power from renewable sources, including individual producers. And in California, solar scored its biggest coup yet last week, with the passage of a state bill that authorizes regulators to raise the cap on net metering and lays the groundwork for a new net metering system that ensures the policy will remain in place for the next decade, at least."Utilities have a simple argument that sounds compelling, but time and again, we've seen such strong public outcry against the idea of utilities trying to take away the right to generate power that the decisions have actually come down on the side of solar customers," said Rosalind Jackson, a spokesperson for the climate-change advocacy group Vote Solar."This is a regulated industry that has not had to innovate for a century," Jackson added. "But they are faced with a real disruptive technology. There are new entrants for customers who have never had an option before. So that's a very real threat.""We don't need a big centralized corporate entity to generate electricity. We can do it ourselves."