The city council is scheduled to vote tonight to consider with-drawing from the Bloomberg grant for more solar electric power for Georgetown.
The Wilco Sun has an editorial in the July 21, 2019 edition of the paper lays out the absurdity of the City entering into another money losing solar energy agreement!
Wilco Sun Editorial, July 21, 2019
"Why rub salt in the wound? Last October Georgetown won a
contest called the “Mayor’s Challenge” put on by Bloomberg Philanthropies. The
prize was a $1 million grant to test the idea of hooking up rooftop solar
panels to banks of neighborhood batteries. In theory the electricity stored in
the batteries would be released during high-demand times, replacing power
bought from outside sources.
However, by the time the grant came up for a city council
vote in late April, the public had learned of the enormous cost overrun in our
renewable energy contracts. We buy twice as much electricity as we use and sell
the surplus at a big loss. The additional electricity from these solar panels
would only add to our problems. An idea that seemed plausible in October had by
April become little more than a publicity stunt.
First vote. When the grant came up for a vote at the April 9
council meeting, it ran into opposition from Councilmen Gonzalez and Pitts who
focused on practical matters — cost, added staff time, etc.
The conversation looked like it was about to go off script,
and Mayor Ross quickly arranged for a postponement. A council election — in
which three council members who had signed the energy contracts were
encountering energetic opposition — was less than a month away.
Second Vote. Six days after the election, the Bloomberg item
suddenly reappeared on the agenda of the first meeting after the election. At
that meeting, Councilman Hesser would be absent, and Councilman Triggs, who had
just defeated Mr. Hesser, would not yet be sworn in.
At that meeting, Jack Daly, assistant to the city manager,
explained the changes that ostensibly answered earlier objections, but in
reality were minor touchups. The Bloomberg contract was unchanged in any
material way. The same risks and liabilities remained for Georgetown, and the
Bloomberg people still had control of information that came out of the
experiment. The citizen’s right to know was — once again — made subordinate to
the interest of others.
Gonzalez and Pitts argued their points. The mayor called for
a vote, and the council voted 4-2 to accept the grant and its obligations.
Mr. Triggs now says that had he been sworn in at that time,
he would have voted against the grant and its unknown future obligations. It is
now clear that Mayor Ross most likely scheduled the vote as quickly as possible
to avoid any more opposition.
So Georgetown is now committed to an open-ended project with
no defined goal. If the project is deemed successful, Georgetown will be
obligated to pick up the cost of running it after two years, including its
$100,000-a-year manager, and who knows what else. Actually, no one knows.
You may ask, “This success, what’s the measure?”
You won’t know, because it’s not your call. The contract
says “success” will be whatever the Bloomberg people say it is. It’s their
call, not Georgetown’s. You may also wonder why — with the data on over 250
residential solar installations in Georgetown and on the array of solar panels
on the Westside Service Center — you may wonder why run an experiment at all?
Battery capacity is well understood, and a straightforward engineering
analysis, using the years of data gathered by the city, could answer the
question without this cumbersome fiddling.
Maybe someone has.
During his presentation at the second meeting in May, Mr.
Daly made a brief statement, a statement so soft and casual as to seem like an
afterthought. He said, “ ... if we did not expand or grow the program, the
overhead to maintain the solar panels and batteries that only a million dollars
would buy would never be sustainable on their own. They would always need a
subsidy.”
We can only assume that the approving majority did not hear,
or think important, what Mr. Daly had just said.
A third vote? Councilman Fought has now put the matter back
on the agenda for the next council meeting, and we thank him for that. By now,
arguments opposing the grant have had time to settle in, and perhaps the thing
is clearer today than when that rushed vote was taken in May.
Maybe this time the bill-paying citizens of Georgetown will
get more consideration than does an outside advocacy organization with an
agenda.
Just maybe we’ll get a fair shake.
We Georgetown bill-payers are spending millions each year
buying surplus wind and solar power that we must sell at a loss so others can
go high-dollar green at dirt-cheap prices.
This forced subsidy of others cuts Georgetown deep. Why let
the “Mayor’s Challenge” salt the wound?"
