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Editor’s note: Solar and EV could transform rural areas by making them energy-independent, but only if rural communities have the tools to make that happen. Otherwise, mega corporations will scoop up all the profits of the coming energy revolution. To understand what could be done, let’s imagine a letter from a happy, and energy-independent, rural resident... in 2030: Welcome to Christmas Eve, 2030. I am driving my Chevy Silverado pickup home past my local gas station. The gas price there is $7, and diesel is even more! Yes, it seems oil prices are being driven up by yet another conflict somewhere in the world. But...that’s not my problem! I – like most of my neighbors - am driving an EV! Sky-high gas prices? Who cares? As I pull into my driveway, I pass my 15-kilowatt solar panel array, mounted on the ground a short distance from my house. Thanks to it, I not only pay zero dollars for my electricity, heat and vehicle fuel, but my electric utility actually pays me for the surplus energy I produce! Altogether, I have gone from shelling out $1,500 a month for energy-related costs to actually making $200 a month! What a difference that has made in our family’s monthly budget! In fact, I am finally saving money for my kids to go to college! As I plug my pickup into its charger, I think about all the other little ways I can save money now. Like the fact that I don’t need to own an emergency generator for days when the power goes out. Now my pickup acts as my backup generator thanks to its reverse charging capability. And when I am out working in the fields and need to use an electric tool? I just plug it into the pickup. Pretty sweet. Yep, it would be really hard to go back to the old days of high energy bills —when you never knew when the big companies might suddenly jack up their prices. Now, I am energy independent – and then some! Unlike my poor brother and sister who live in the big city. One lives in a high-rise apartment and parks on the street – no way for him to plug in an EV! And the other has a suburban house, but the orientation is all wrong for good solar – he gets a little from it but sure isn’t energy-independent like I am. Yep, it turns out that the future of solar and energy independence was – rural! That said, the truth is, none of this would have happened without some smart (for a change!) politicians. Yes, the technology was there and it was amazing – but it was also pretty expensive to pay for upfront. I didn’t think I could ever save enough to buy it. You don’t transform your world from old to new energy just like that. I really worried that the energy revolution was going to pass me by. And that’s where the politicians came in. They realized that the big banks and corporations were never going to help us out, especially in rural areas. No, the corporate boardrooms were going to string us out to maximize their profits. So the politicians realized that their constituents needed another organization – one that would put their interests first by providing both money at a fair rate to buy the equipment and expertise in how to do it. And they had a good model for that – member-owned cooperatives have played key roles in rural America, from the electric cooperatives the government helped create in the 1930s to member-owned credit unions today. So, Congress created the Rural Energy Support Act, that created a template for Rural Energy Cooperatives around the country. And gave them major start-up funding to get the ball rolling. And that is how I was able to get a great package of reasonably-priced loans and tax credits to start my own little energy revolution. Not only that, but that same Act mandated that electric utilities buy my excess solar energy at a fair price. Boy, the utilities hated that! They didn’t want to share their profits with us little guys. But that has really made a difference for my neighbor who has a small farm. With that mandate and low-cost loans and grants under the Rural Energy Act, he was able to install 10 acres of solar panels. Now, his little farm, which used to just break-even in a good year, is doing very nicely for him. Lots of our local farmers and small businesses are doing the same thing. They get a lot of help from the government’s REAP program, which existed before under the USDA, but is now doing gangbuster work for rural areas. I often think: what would have happened if Congress hadn’t had the foresight to create a rural and small-business path to energy independence? What if they had just let big business control everything, driving up our prices just to increase their investor dividends? They would have called it “market forces”, but we all know that it really would have been “lobbyist forces” – because the big guys can afford to pay lobbyists to shape the rules to work for them rather than the rest of us. But not this time! Congress and state legislators did the right thing! And they did the right thing because rural communities didn’t just sit back and let corporate lobbyists drive policy. Instead, we made sure that our elected representatives voted to provide rural communities with the tools we need to compete fairly. And the politicians who didn’t listen? We just voted them right out of office! Editor’s conclusion: we hope you enjoyed this “letter” from 2030. The bottom line is that solar and EVs can be a powerful positive change for rural communities. The problem however, is that big technological change is always costly and if politicians don’t get the policy environment right, the rich and powerful will just get richer and more powerful, at everyone else’s expense. Are our politicians ready?
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