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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday January 22 2017, @12:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the campaign-finance dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23 2017, @05:35PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23 2017, @05:35PM (#457709)

    it is not clear what this bill should do.
    is it to protect (potential) individual micro and pico PV-solar electricty producers from being swamped
    by endless cheap energy from central massive industrial scale PV solar parks?
    -or-
    is it to protect the coal business from going out of business if huge scale solar PV farms were allowed?

    it seems that individual pico and micro PV genererator are not penalized but are encouraged to help
    power the grid via net-metering.
    However, maybe this concession is only granted because there are not enough real (house) roofs to challenge
    the new 3'000 MegaWatt coal powerplant anyways.

    so "teh best(tm)" is probably to prioritize small micro and pico power producers (with the downside of
    lots of paper and administration work, registration, permit etc.)

    the second best is industrial size PV solar parks, that are green, unlimited but still funnel the money into some
    few greedy hands (as before).

    and the worst is probably to ignore the sun in the sky completely ... dig out more coal and funnel money into a few hands.