DAILY TRIFECTA: Power Struggles

The future's so bright you gotta run your A/C non-stop

TITLE: Fossil Fuel Interests Are Working to Kill Solar in One Ohio County. The Hometown Newspaper Is Helping.
https://www.propublica.org/article/ohio-mount-vernon-frasier-solar-fossil-fuel-metric-media

EXCERPT: Word tends to spread fast in rural Knox County, Ohio. But misinformation has spread faster.

The first article in the Mount Vernon News last fall about a planned solar farm simply noted that residents were “expressing their concern.” But soon the county’s only newspaper was packed with stories about solar energy that almost uniformly criticized the project and quoted its opponents.

Then a new “grassroots” organization materialized and invited locals to an elaborate event billed as a town hall, with a keynote speaker who denied that humans cause climate change.

Someone sent text messages to residents urging them to “stop the solar invasion” and elect two county commission candidates who opposed the solar farm. And one day this past March, residents received an unfamiliar newspaper that contained only articles attacking Frasier Solar, a large project that would replace hundreds of acres of corn and soybeans with the equivalent of 630 football fields of solar panels.

To many in the deep-red central Ohio community, it seemed that solar had become the focus of news and politics. They were right. Fossil fuel interests were secretly working to shape the conversation in Knox County.

Each cog in the anti-solar machine — the opposition group, the texts, the newspaper, the energy publication — was linked to the others through finances and overlapping agendas, an investigation by Floodlight, ProPublica and The Tow Center for Digital Journalism found.

The campaign against solar power benefited from a confluence of two powerful forces funded by oil and gas interests. A former executive at Ariel Corporation, the county’s largest employer and one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of methane gas compressors, was working behind the scenes. And helping in a more public way is the Mount Vernon News, a newspaper now in the hands of Metric Media, which operates websites that reportedly engage in pay-to-play coverage.

Ariel and the former executive did not respond to requests for comment. Metric Media’s leader did not answer questions for this story; he has previously denied that his news outlets are partisan.

Across the country, the oil and gas industry and power companies have exploited a struggling news industry and a fraught political process to fight the transition to clean energy and maximize profits, Floodlight and its partners have reported. In Florida, two power companies paid a consulting firm to hire newspapers to attack a pro-solar politician. In Alabama, the state’s largest monopoly electric company purchased a historic Black newspaper, then didn’t write about soaring power bills. In California, Chevron launched its own newsroom when other papers shuttered; it doesn’t cover itself critically.

In Mount Vernon, a city of 17,000 where the local university named its new sports complex CH4 after the chemical formula for methane, a variety of tactics have been deployed simultaneously, creating an anti-solar echo chamber.

Residents are bombarded with dubious claims: Solar panels are toxic. Their construction depletes the soil and floods fields and depresses home values. China is using them to invade. The campaign has stoked their skepticism and ignited their passions. It intensified the debate in a conservative county that prizes its roots in the gas industry.

Bright yellow “No Industrial Solar” yard signs have sprung up everywhere, competing with a smattering of green “Yes Solar” ones. Citizens packed local government meetings. More than 4,000 public comments, both for and against, were filed with the state regulator that will decide if the solar project can be built — triple the number for any previous solar project in Ohio. And all those opinions have drowned out the voices of the nine landowners, mostly farmers, who’ve signed leases with Frasier’s developer and for whom a total of about $60 million is at stake.

“People are so radicalized and they’re not thinking clearly,” said Rich Piar, a third-generation farmer who hopes to secure his financial future by leasing a portion of his 1,650 acres to Open Road Renewables, the Texas-based company developing the Frasier Solar project.

Politicians who didn’t forcefully denounce the solar project were attacked in Mount Vernon News stories. Thom Collier, a long-serving Republican on the county commission who thinks landowners should be able to choose whether to use their property for solar infrastructure, ultimately lost his reelection bid after a barrage of misleading coverage about his stance on solar.

“I pin this on one or two people from Ariel and some close friends that they have,” Collier said of the anti-solar offensive. “They determined it didn’t matter how much money it would take, they were going to fight this and make it ugly, and they have.”

TITLE: Arizona Voters at Breaking Point Over Cost of Electricity
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/arizona-electricity-bills-trump-election-2024-b665468c

EXCERPTS: Gasoline is often the energy cost voters think about most. But in Arizona, electricity is giving it a run for its money. Rate increases, and a historic 113 consecutive days of temperatures peaking at or above 100 degrees in Phoenix, have generated record air conditioning bills and widespread consternation. Modest-sized homes are paying as much as $500 a month, while the biggest properties are shelling out $1,000 or more. Even some homes with solar panels are receiving surprisingly large bills. 

The electric utility Arizona Public Service, or APS, says that between the hotter weather and higher rates, its average residential customer is paying 16.4% more for electricity this summer. APS supplies LeFevre and about half of Maricopa County, where most of the state’s population lives.

Sunbelt states such as Arizona have seen a sharp rise in residents, drawing Californians chasing lower housing costs and retirees looking for warm weather and a low tax rate. What they also find is severe heat that strains government resources and individual budgets.

Former President Donald Trump has seized on the issue, promising in several campaign stops in Arizona to slash AC and other energy bills—something that is easier said than done. Ruben Gallego, the Democratic congressman running for Senate, called on the federal government to provide more resources to help vulnerable Arizonans pay their AC bills. 

Air conditioning can be a matter of life and death in this desert climate. Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, said 645 people died from heat-related causes in 2023—most outdoors but about a quarter indoors. In most of the indoor cases, an AC unit was present, but it was often broken. More than a third of people with stable residences who visited a Maricopa County cooling center last year said they struggled to pay their energy bills, a county study showed. 

In the…Sun City retirement community, condominium owner Melanie Boone said she is $298 past due on her APS power bill and keeping her thermostat at 81 degrees to try to save money. 

“My direct neighbor, she just turned 82,” Boone said. “She keeps her air at 84. It’s unbearable to me. I can’t go visit her in the summer.” 

In a statement, APS said this summer was the hottest on record for Phoenix. “The nights were hotter too, and overnight temperatures didn’t provide the same relief as last year,” forcing AC units to run through the night and rack up bigger bills, the company said. LeFevre’s higher energy demand accounted for about two-thirds of her bill increases, with higher rates explaining the rest, APS said. 

The utility added that it needed the recent rate increase to keep investing in power generation, saying peak electricity demand will grow by about 40% over the next eight years.

Sherry and Vic McCullough, who have solar panels on the roof of their 1,600-square-foot Sun City home, normally pay APS about $20 a month for electricity. In August, their bill was $249. That is on top of the $161 they spend each month to lease their panels from a separate company.

When Sherry McCullough called to question the bill, an APS representative told her the McCulloughs had run out of credits for the solar energy they produce due to this summer’s extreme heat and were therefore consuming more APS-supplied power. “They said to expect it again next month,” she said, from a living room decorated with autumnal pumpkins as the AC whirred full blast. 

TITLE: Vomiting, cramps and lethargy: As heat rises, California kids are sweltering in schools with no air conditioning 
https://calmatters.org/environment/climate-change/2024/10/california-schools-air-conditioning-heatwave-climate/

EXCERPT: As climate change intensifies heat waves, California schools are unprepared to protect their students from extreme heat. Some schools don’t have air conditioning at all, because they were built before hotter climates made it a necessity. Others have old systems pushed to their limits, with school districts struggling to keep up with repairs or replacements with limited staff and funding. 

For instance, in Long Beach — which reached a record high of 109 degrees last month — all or most buildings in 13 public schools with about 14,000 students have no air conditioning systems. In Oakland, as many as 2,000 classrooms don’t have them. And in Fresno, officials have been overwhelmed with more than 5,000 calls for air conditioning repairs in the past 12 months.

Between 15 and 20% of California’s kindergarten through 12th grade public schools “have no functioning heating and air conditioning systems at all, and as many as another 10% of schools need major repair or replacement for their systems to function adequately,” UC Berkeley and Stanford University researchers wrote in a report last year.  Some advocates say that is likely an underestimate.  

School officials say they would need tens of billions of dollars to install and repair air conditioning. Many of the worst problems are in hot, inland school districts that serve low-income communities of color, where there are fewer financial resources to replace or repair them.

“If it’s too hot, just like if you’re too hungry, it’s almost impossible to learn, so the impact on students and teachers is great,” said Paul Idsvoog, the Fresno Unified School District’s chief operations officer. “If you have multiple systems that are 20 years old, sooner or later you’re not going to be able to keep up with the tide.”

Voters in November will be asked to approve a $10 billion school infrastructure bond to fund repairs and upgrades of buildings at K-12 schools and community colleges, including air conditioning systems.

Gov. Gavin Newsom last month vetoed a bill that would have created a master plan for climate-resilient schools, including an assessment of when air conditioning systems were last modernized. State officials currently do not collect data on air conditioning in schools.

Nationally 41% of school districts need to update or replace their heating, air conditioning and ventilation systems in at least half of their schools, according to a federal study. 

SEE ALSO:

California’s Governor rules that schools and farms cannot use their own solar energy production
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/10/02/californias-governor-rules-that-schools-and-farms-cannot-use-their-own-solar-energy-production/