The Florida Amendment 1 Con
This is the ballot text for Amendment 1:
This amendment establishes a right under Florida’s constitution for consumers to own or lease solar equipment installed on their property to generate electricity for their own use. State and local governments shall retain their abilities to protect consumer rights and public health, safety and welfare, and to ensure that consumers who do not choose to install solar are not required to subsidize the costs of backup power and electric grid access to those who do.
Look carefully at the second of the two sentences: “State and local governments shall retain their abilities to protect consumer rights and public health, safety and welfare, and to ensure that consumers who do not choose to install solar are not required to subsidize the costs of backup power and electric grid access to those who do.”
What does the right to install solar panels have to do with: “State and local governments shall retain their abilities to protect consumer rights and public health, safety and welfare,” ? This isn’t the medical cannabis amendment, or the right to own surface-to-surface missiles amendment.
Finally we get to the real purpose: “ensure that consumers who do not choose to install solar are not required to subsidize the costs of backup power and electric grid access to those who do”.
To discourage people from using solar panels the utilities want to be able to charge those people huge amounts to be attached to the grid or simply refuse to connect them, to protect the people who don’t have solar panels from providing any kind of subsidy.
4 comments
Voted against it. The slick ads were the tip-off that it was being promoted by those with deep pockets, and further investigation proved it so.
The whole thing made no sense as a constitutional amendment, and less sense after reading it. After I read them I check the suspicious ones to see who is paying for what, i.e. who is supporting and who is opposing.
When you don’t know which way to vote, seeing who’s for it and who’s against it is always a reliable way to choose. We had a ballot proposition here in California to tie Medicaid drug prices to the VA negotiated drug prices. I wasn’t sure that was a good idea, until Big Pharma jumped in with a $40M campaign to defeat it. At which time, “If Big Pharma is agin’ it, I’m for it” became my motto.
The Koch brothers and Exxon have donated money to get Amendment 1 passed in Florida.