There was a story about solar energy in yesterday’s New York Times. There was a very different story about solar energy in today’s Los Angeles Times. It would be nice, very nice indeed, if policy makers in this country read both these stories and drew the appropriate conclusions.

The New York Times story was about a wonderfully intelligent, market-based method of putting solar panel-generating electricity atop individual homes in a way that cost homeowners nothing (that’s right nothing!), while also making money for the installers of these units and for the large Wall Street banks (yes, them!) who are funding the installers.

Here’s how this arrangements works. Installers buy cheap Chinese-made solar panels (alas, America blew this end of the industry) that are put on the homes of credit worthy home owners at no cost to the latter. The electricity generated by these panels, however, is paid by the homeowner to the installer, though at a rate no higher than he/she pays for electricity at present.

Hence, no extra out-of-pocket for the homeowner. The installer (and its Wall Street backers) meanwhile derive an estimated 7-13 per cent return per annum on electricity payments.

One might add, looking ahead, that hard-pressed local governments with large numbers of their own buildings (police and fire stations, hospitals, et. al.) would be crazy not to go for similar deals that would not only be good publicity as public-private partnerships, but would also generate decent jobs for locally-based skilled solar panel installers. (Chicago, Philadelphia, are you listening?)

That was the solar tale in yesterday’s New York Times. Which brings us to today’s very different solar tale written about in today’s Los Angeles Times.

This story is about the California legislature’s approval of a proposed 663-megawatt solar plant in the desert, a plant that’s supposed to feed electricity into an existing utility grid. Environmentalists hate this solar project because of its potential destruction of a precious desert ecology. It’s also the kind of project that requires an enormous amount of government intervention, approval, and various other kinds of financial and non-financial support.

Now let’s compare these two projects for what they mean, could mean, should mean for the future of solar energy, and for the future of power generation in this country and around the world generally.

The individual units on individual buildings approach taps into the inherently decentralized nature of solar energy, rather than centralizing solar technology for the benefit of utilities. The former is thus the future — individuals (and local governments) getting off the grid. The latter is the past — like adding a motor to a horse-drawn cart so your horse can jump in the cart once in awhile to rest.

Individual solar units rather than centralized solar generation gives individuals control over their home’s power source. In terms of employment, though building one large solar power plant creates a one-time big surge of employment, tens of thousands of individual solar installations create more jobs over a longer period and are an ongoing source of employment. And by the by, also an ongoing source of safe and socially responsible investment for Wall Street.

As an added benefit, as Kay Wood, a contributor to TMV has noted, if local governments adopt this no-cost, job-creating approach to solar installation atop their police and fire stations and hospitals, they achieve an added measure of homeland security against terrorists who might one day bring down a centralized power plant – or an entire power grid. 
   
Even with our fractured contemporary politics, the obvious solar choice here is a truly bipartisan one. The left loves solar. The right loves individual control. Let’s run with this one big time.