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Ten years ago, in 1998, New Mexico’s largest investor-owned utility, PNM, solicited bids to build a 5 megawatt solar electric power plant. Had the project gone forward, it would have been the world’s largest operating solar-electric power plant. But the project was stopped when 28 small solar companies in New Mexico, including my own, filed an objection.

As members of New Mexico’s Solar Energy Industries Association, each of us had mixed feelings about stopping a project that would surely bring attention to our state’s solar industry. But the more we learned about the project, the clearer it became that we needed to intervene.

The $50 million dollar price tag for the project was to be paid by ratepayers – financed over 20-years. But the cost of solar equipment at that time was falling every year, so we showed that by building smaller plants each year, we would end up with three times the installed solar capacity. Taking out a 20-year loan on equipment that falls in price every year makes no sense, but the project marched on anyway.

PNM was moving into the solar business – our business – with no risk, we argued, because they were allowed to bill all of their costs to ratepayers. This, while we were building solar power systems that needed PNM’s permission before they could be interconnected – permission that could be denied at any time, including after a system was built and ready to operate. Again, our objections were cast aside.

We filed a freedom of information request for the bids that had been submitted on the project, and found that the contract for the power plant had been awarded to the company that had received the lowest score on technology. It turned out that that company already had a contract with one of the members of the evaluation committee, but even this conflict of interest was not enough to stop the project.

So what finally put an end to PNM’s quest to build the world’s largest solar power plant?

We asked one, final, simple question about the project: What was PNM planning to do with the solar energy produced by the plant? It turned out that after collecting money from ratepayers to cover 100 percent of the costs for the plant, PNM was going to sell the solar energy to back to us. That did it – the project was mortally wounded when news of the double-billing hit the streets.

Now, ten years later, investor-owned utilities are contemplating another solar power plant – this one about 20-times the size of the last one. It’s too early to tell whether the same mischief will take place, but we can say with certainty that this project is based on the same, poor premise of putting investor-owned utilities in control of renewable energy.

This, while Denmark and other countries nationalize their power grids, modernize them to eliminate central control so that they can accept more renewable energy, and then promulgate feed-in tariffs to encourage small, independent companies to build renewable energy.

We can, and we must, do the same in the United States.

A video newscast containing this story is posted here.

Rising energy costs are a big problem, creating a direct financial hardship for those who can least afford it. High energy costs hit hardest in rural communities, where many residents commute long distances to low-wage jobs, and rely on propane – one of the most expensive fuels available – for home heating. Together, these two factors are threatening to destroy the rural communities that are the heart of this great country.

Big problems deserve big solutions, but so far, the proposals to address the energy crisis coming out of Washington have failed to contemplate the magnitude and scope of the energy problem.Even the presidential candidates, given a national stage every day to present a new platform on energy, have not taken the opportunity to put forth ideas on the scale needed to address the energy crisis in this country.

Let’s assume for a moment that the reason our politicians have put forth no credible plans for solving the energy crisis is that they don’t have any idea how to do it. In that case, here’s a fresh perspective: rather than trying to create an energy supply that can sustain our economy, let’s instead create an economy that can be sustained by our energy supply. It goes something like this:

Every town in America should immediately conduct an economic leakage study to characterize the loss of dollars from the community, particularly for importing food and energy from outside the community. Next, identify the greatest opportunities to reduce the losses through local production of food, fuels, and electricity.

Federal, state, and local governments must enact policies and fund programs to build economic resilience and security by applying the principles of local self-reliance to food and energy. For food, that means providing funding and support for community gardens, small farms and farm cooperatives, and local farmers markets. For thermal energy, it means creating opportunities and incentives for local, independent companies to heat local schools and businesses with solar and biomass energy. For transportation fuels, it means setting up small-scale, regional fuel cooperatives to grow, process, and deliver fuel from a diverse array of regionally appropriate biofuel crops. And for electricity, it means transferring ownership of the entire wires infrastructure to the public sector – and operating it the way we run our national highway system – for the public good.

Imagine unleashing the awesome power of government on a set of policies and programs that promote community self-reliance in food and energy, putting an end to the perverse incentives and programs that have created the least efficient, most polluting, energy and food system the world has ever known.

Imagining a government like this – one that works in the public interest – is imagining a revolution that is long overdue.

Doing the same thing over and over again, and each time expecting to get a different result, has frequently been used to define the word “insanity”. If we accept this definition, then members of congress and utility regulators must be insane.

Holding forty hearings on oil prices, taking testimony from the same oil company spokespersons and their highly-paid shills, and expecting to gain new insight, is insane. This, while scores of real academics and nonprofit institutions perfect decades of research on oil decline and their proposals for an orderly phase-out of petroleum, and continue to go unheard.

It is every bit as insane to expect nuclear power utilities –  the same ones that sold us the first round of the polluting, expensive, and dangerous generators under a slogan of “too cheap to meter” – to now doom their industry by developing renewable energy. They would rather spend money on advertisements telling us how green they are, and then use our money to pay for the ads.

This year, residents, businesses, and industries in the United States will spend $2 trillion buying energy derived from oil, gas, coal, and nuclear fuels. At the end of the year, the fuel will have been consumed, we will be poorer by $2 trillion dollars, and the companies we gave this money to will be richer and more powerful. Then, we will head into 2009 with another $2 trillion dollars in hand, give it to them again, and expect a different result.

That is also insane.

Who is telling us that renewable energy is expensive, unreliable, inefficient, impractical, and insufficient to meet our energy needs? Could that message be coming from the same companies that sell us energy from sources that need to be mined and pumped again and again, year after year?

Is it possible that if we instead took the $2 trillion dollars – just one year of energy expenditure, and gave it to small, independent businesses to build public infrastructures that capture and deliver renewable energy, that every American could then have their energy needs met by local, renewable resources? We need to stop saying that what we want is renewable energy, and start saying that we want our energy dollars to go to small, independent, community-based businesses.

Renewable energy is easy to build from the technical and economic perspectives. But between us and renewable energy stands a giant that feeds on $2 trillion dollars a year, and uses the money, above all else, to convince us and our government that we need to keep feeding it.

Until that stops, we will keep getting the same result. Unless, of course, I am insane.

The video newscast that includes this commentary is here.

The “food versus fuel” debate points out the weaknesses of, and the linkages between, our industrialized food system and our industrialized energy system. The key word here is “industrialized” – our food and energy systems are highly industrialized, such that it takes only a few of us, along with some powerful fossil fuels, to provide food and energy for the rest of us.

The industrial revolution was, indeed, a revolution. The tools created to foment this revolution replaced widespread and distributed human labor – powered by food, with highly centralized machine labor, powered primarily by fossil fuels. Most of the textbook accounts of this transition cite the marvels of the increased economic activity that followed, but few accounts – if any, cite the hazards of moving from a food economy to a fuel economy.

As we now work to bring about the next revolution – the one that returns us to an economy based on renewable energy, we should ask each other, “which characteristics of the fossil energy economy should we take with us, and which should we leave behind?” Were there aspects of the carbohydrate economy, which was itself a renewable energy economy, that we should be looking to resurrect for this next revolution?

Without over-romanticizing the old days of exhausting farm labor, we can still admit that there were characteristics of that time that were healthier from a social and an economic perspective. The most notable quality of that time that we should be trying to resurrect was resilience: with millions of family farms dotted across the country, a hardship in one area – a drought or a flood, could be made up by a more fortunate region. But we’ve lost four million farms in the United States over the last 50 years, as family farms are replaced by industrial farms. Add to that our single-minded dependence on petroleum, now controlled by a few industrial giants, and the greatest mistake of industrialism is clear: we have placed our fate in the hands of a few corporations.

Many believe that the renewable energy revolution will automatically restore the resilience we seek, but it’s not true that it happens automatically. The giants of industrial food have moved into organics and into biofuels, creating a confused call for sustainability on an industrial scale.

A revolution is a time to re-take power and control from the few, and return it to the many. We can accept that the industrial models for food and for fuel served a purpose, in their own place and time, and we can also accept their time has come and gone, and move forward to a new time of local food, and local fuels.

Higher energy prices, drilling for oil in pristine natural areas, and attempting to revive nuclear power are all outgrowths of the same phenomenon: oil and gas decline. It had to happen sometime – we’ve been hooked on powerful but finite energy resources for more than a hundred years now.

It’s not difficult to kick the habit of oil and gas from a technical perspective – if you add up all the energy we get from coal, oil, and gas every day, it doesn’t hold a candle to the energy the sun provides – the sun gives us 14,000 times more energy on a daily basis. There isn’t even an economic problem associated with getting off oil and gas. In fact, the transition to renewable energy would put an end to the practice of shipping more than a billion dollars a day out of the country to buy foreign energy.

Renewables are price-stable, because once installed, there are no fuel costs. And studies of renewable energy systems all show higher job creation and better local retention of energy dollars. So if switching to renewables is technically feasible and economically beneficial, why instead are we drilling in pristine areas and reviving nuclear power?

The answer of course is buried in that last word – power. The Greeks word for power is “kratos” – but for the Greeks this word also meant “rule”. To them, it was clear that the one with the power was the ruler. They added the word “demos”, meaning “people” to form “demokratia”, or “democracy” meaning “rule by the people”.

We still say we have a democracy, but as long as our energy supply is controlled by the few – the powerful, there is no denying that they are the rulers.