[ilbegone]

These Green Programs are basically a scam. They are a way of requiring everyone to swap out their old system with a new one. With the guise of being earth friendly, which in reality often isn't, the companies doing the manufacturing or delivering the service have a whole new market to sell to. Kind of like clothing designers change trendy styles to get more sales.

I think I know what you're saying.

The Solar and Wind farms are out for DWP, as far as what I see.

There was the proposed Solar project in the Coachella Valley which was scratched due to "environmentalist activism" concerning related transmission line construction through Riverside and San Bernardino County Desert to the DWP substation north of Victorville.

The other part, which might work, has to do with Federal tax incentive solar panel construction on roof tops, which is payed for by the customer but are payed back over the years to the customer by tax breaks and utility buying excess generation into the grid.

However, the utility is not going to pay for any generation into the grid over the customer's zeroed out electrical usage.

The "green jobs" which are supposed to come out of rooftop solar in Los Angeles has to do with Local 18 inside wiremen largely sowing up the installation of such facilities. It's been some time and I might not remember exactly, but I believe there has been a law passed which states that only Licensed contractors can install the systems (which excludes qualified journeyman electrical workers or any one else doing so with a valid permit and inspection on their own residences) and which also favors exclusive employment of local 18 electricians by those contractors.

And remember, with the configuration set up required, if the utility servicing your house has a power outage of any kind, you are out of power as long as anyone else on your part of the utility circuit due to the legally required switching system at your house. No such thing as a "free" lunch.

I don't know what the scheme is now, but a utility in California was required to buy electricity from independently owned wind and solar farms at the highest determined avoided cost of building new utility owned generation facilities, which in the 80's might have have been determined to be be 13 cents a Kilowatt hour when the utility might have been able to either generate with existing facilities or purchase electricity at 4 cents or less a Kilowatt hour (My best recollection).

Those costs get passed on to the consumer.