Member-only story
I’d Like to Ask My Contemps in AZ How They Fell For the Corporate Take-over of Solar Energy
As an old hippie, this was something I could not understand.
It all took place around the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. Nora and I had been living in Arizona since 1984. When I was younger in the 70’s, Solar was an exciting proposition for the future. Some pioneers were getting off the grid by installing it in their homes. It was pretty easy.
But then, some brilliant thinkers in Arizona Public Service and Salt River Project — our Electric Companies — came up with a way to distort the entire Solar Energy movement to their own corporate purposes.
Damn, those corporate guys were smart! I had to admire their cleverness. Give the Devil his due.
And I really mean it when I say they were brilliant. They marketed their take-over of Solar Energy to make the public believe it was to our advantage to get Solar from our Electric Companies!
The result of which, predictably, was that now it’s all a part of our expensive Electricity bill.
Enough citizens fell for it — even people my age who should have known better — that it worked!
I had a good friend — a dedicated Yoga student of mine — who loved regaling me with the latest…
