Red state, blue state: moral hazard often trumps self-reliance

Walworth County, South Dakota has a population of about 5,300 souls; it's rural, backwards and overwhelmingly Republican.

Oahe Solar is a large solar project being built in central South Dakota. While it could potentially power thousands of households, 350 megawatts doesn’t do much if residents aren’t on board. [Bill Janklow's idea of public radio]

Ice storms and other calamities driven by anthropogenic climate hijinx routinely knock out electric power often resulting in lost lives and the inevitable cyber attacks on the US will take down the grid for days, even months causing food shortages and mayhem but the addition of virtual power plants or VPPs can change that handling some twenty percent of peak power demand by 2030. 

Vermont is mostly rural, progressive and overwhelmingly Democratic.

Green Mountain Power’s former C.E.O., Mary Powell, left three years ago and soon took over Sunrun, which supplies rooftop solar panels and storage batteries for hundreds of thousands of homes nationwide, and serves as a third-party power aggregator for several utilities. In fact, if utilities don’t move fast enough, they may find themselves not with new opportunities but with new competition. So the goal is to create a system that runs mostly on locally generated solar power, and has the capability to isolate buildings “from the broader grid in the event of an emergency. [Bill McKibben]

The cost of subsidizing, manufacturing, transporting, erecting, maintaining then removing and disposing of just one wind turbine eyesore bat and bird killer would take a thousand subscribers to energy self-reliance. Microgrid technologies are destined to enhance tribal sovereignty, free communities from electric monopolies and net-metering only gives control back to utilities enabled by moral hazard.

Learn more at NPR.