To keep warming below the Paris agreement targets, we need wind and solar companies the world over to deliver utility-scale renewable electricity cheaper and more reliably than fossil fuel energy companies are doing now. But can they?
The fossil fuel industry certainly isn't going to make it easy for them, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking that wind and solar companies are benevolent actors and not just as ruthlessly profit-driven as their fossil fueled competitors. Because while the dirty energy industry is certainly playing dirty disinformation games to seed public opposition to otherwise popular technologies, "clean" energy companies are still companies, after all.
Case in point, professional Don Quixotian windmill tilter Robert Bryce's latest Forbes column, like past ones, illustrates the flaws of relying on capitalism to solve the climate crisis capitalism created. Bryce points to a few examples from his "Renewable Rejection Database" of "more than 330 communities [that] have rejected wind projects since 2015" and tells the story of a few communities fighting with big clean energy companies over proposed wind and solar farms.
The odds are probably pretty good that the local opposition to these clean energy projects are driven by disinformation and Big Oil shenanigans fostering toxic communities on Facebook. But we don't have time for all of these little fights over every single project. The climate crisis demands a lot of renewables to be built in a very short amount of time. The energy industry, which has wanted to gut environmental regulations for decades, are claiming loosening regulations would allow for companies to build clean energy projects.
But there's a much, much better way, that doesn't sacrifice rural communities to any sort of energy company, clean or dirty, and instead puts the power directly in the public's hands. Literally.
Public power, the idea that governments should simply build our own wind turbines and solar panels, went from an ecosocialist dream in 2018 to near-reality in New York in 2022. How? Matthew Haugen at Terrain spoke with DSA organizer Patrick Robbins about the creation of the Public Power NY coalition, which pushed for the passage of the Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA) through the New York State Senate this year, only to see the State Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie refuse to bring it up for a vote this session. (But is holding post-session meetings, due to public demand, a welcome sign.)
Because the original New Deal created the New York Power Authority, the state has the largest public utility in the U.S. And NY's Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act set a goal of 70% renewables by 2030, which makes public power an attractive option.
"We had painstaking conversations with many, many different constituencies", Robbins told Haugen, "with many different kinds of expertise across the state, including labor, ratepayer advocates, consumer advocates, environmental justice organizations."
With that broad base of support from the public, the "BPRA campaign has also realigned the NY climate movement and drawn clear dividing lines" Haugen writes, with some Big Greens sticking to "the sidelines, while many others have moved left in fighting for it" against the clean energy companies who opposed it. But "Public Power NY has pushed the necessity of public control into the mainstream: the health of people and the planet should not be left in the hands of profit-seeking interests," Haugen writes.
"It's not being dictated by foundation money." said Robbins, and "it's not being dictated where money has historically gone into." Instead, "pushing those priorities is being dictated actually by a mass movement, which is really exciting."
A mass movement that puts the power to fight climate change in the hands of the public can deliver clean public power in the scale and speed that profit-driven capitalism simply can not. Profit-driven power plants will cut every corner, hoard every penny, and as Bryce shows, use their money on teams of lawyers to sue small towns, further alienating rural landowners.
But as we've known for years, if you're getting paid for it, you're not complaining about the wind turbine in your field or solar panels on your roof. If the public has input into the process through that lil ol' relic known as democracy, then they're going to be happier with the result.
It's not complicated. Climate change has, is, and will harm the public. To compensate for that damage, the public should control clean power production required to fight climate change.