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The Christian Science Monitor reports on legislation proposed by Republican law-makers in Wyoming:
The bill would require utilities to use "eligible resources" to meet 95 percent of Wyoming's electricity needs in 2018, and all of its electricity needs in 2019.
Those "eligible resources" are defined solely as coal, hydroelectric, natural gas, nuclear, oil, and individual net metering.
The latter would encompass houses (and businesses?) with solar, wind or co-generation equipment. Utility-scale generation, however, could face a $10/MWh penalty.
The article notes that
Wyoming is the nation's largest coal producer [...] nearly 90 percent of the electricity generated in Wyoming came from coal in September 2016, the most recent month with available data.
A PDF of the bill, SF0071, is available on the Wyoming legislature's Web site.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Sunday January 22 2017, @05:10PM
I would be surprised if the bill passed. Wyoming, like much of the rest of the Mountain West, depends on ranching and farming. Wind farms are a boon to them because they provide a second income from leasing small plots of land for turbines which don't preclude the farming and ranching. There's an additional benefit from the wind farm workers moving into and starting families in the small towns which had been slowly dying. That's a pretty decent countervailing political current to the self-serving legislation introduced by the coal companies. Also, telling a bunch of very independent folks that they can't produce their own power with roof-top solar and wind turbines is a non-starter, especially since fuel costs have a significant impact on their bottom line.
I would say without any CO2 or global warming or climate change stuff factored in the on-the-ground benefits tilt to wind and solar over coal.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Monday January 23 2017, @12:20AM
Also, telling a bunch of very independent folks that they can't produce their own power with roof-top solar and wind turbines is a non-starter [...]
This bill would not penalise those small producers. However, as I mentioned in my other post in this topic, there are conservative efforts to curtail net metering, which would, in effect, make those small installations more costly. The Koch brothers and the American Legislative Exchange Council are behind them.
/article.pl?sid=14/04/28/2143238 [soylentnews.org]
https://web.archive.org/web/20160112220117/http://www.alec.org/publication/net-metering-reform [archive.org]