Last month, Kaveh Kamooneh of Decatur, Ga., found himself under arrest. His crime? He took roughly a nickel’s worth of electricity for his electric car without permission at his son’s middle school. This fiasco prompts hard questions about the politics and public acceptance of clean energy.
Kamooneh’s story began at Chamblee Middle School on a Saturday morning, where he was attending a tennis practice with his his 11-year-old son. After parking, he took the liberty of plugging in his Nissan Leaf to an exterior electrical outlet at the school. About 20 minutes later, he noticed that someone was in his car. When he went to investigate, he found the man was a Chamblee police officer.
«He informed me he was about to arrest me, or at least charge me, for electrical theft,» Kamooneh told Atlanta’s Channel 11 News.
The “theft,” based on retail electricity rates for the area, is valued between four and five cents in total. Kamooneh was arrested 11 days later, after it was confirmed that Kamooneh did not have permission to use the outlet; though police proceeded with the arrest without seeing if the DeKalb School District wished to press charges.
Marc Johnson, police chief and city manager of Chamblee, said the arrest was less about the actual electricity theft and more about Kamooneh’s perceived attitude.
“The officer’s initial incident report gives a good indication of how difficult and argumentative the individual was to deal with,” Johnson wrote in a statement.
Johnson went on to point out that Kamooneh’s theft was actually a trespassing charge, due to the school advising Kamooneh not to use its tennis courts without consent. Despite the trespassing allegations, the idea that the Chamblee Police decided to file theft charges for a situation in which the damages incurred is a fraction of a dollar prompts serious questions about the motivation of these actions. While it could be argued that this is a civil rights case, Kamooneh’s case may reflect a troubling trend that is developing because of the status of green energy in the U.S. today.
A failing infrastructure
Even though electrically-driven vehicles existed before internal-combustion engines, only in light of recent concerns over the diminishing global petroleum reserves and the environmental impact of burning fossil fuels have electric cars, via hydrogen fuel cell, high-capacity battery systems and hybrid car energy designs, gained popularity. But heavy lobbying from the oil industry, coupled with natural distrust by the public for non-gasoline driven vehicles, and a lack of supporting infrastructure, have limited significant sales of electric cars to eight states: California, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island and Vermont.
California leads the charts in America for clean car growth, with its $2,500 consumer electric vehicle rebates, its zero-emission mandates, which call for 1.4 million electric vehicles to be on Californian roads by 2025, the state’s use of carpooling lanes, and its heavily-funded public outreach programs. Despite this, it remains far from international standards for electric vehicle use.
According to the Associated Press and as posted by AllGov, NRG Energy, which is required to build the state’s network of 10,200 electric car charging stations at a cost of $100 million, has only built 10 percent of the stations promised for 2013. NRG blamed the slow pace on public resistance to placing the stations at publicly-accessible spots, such as malls and businesses.
Beyond this, development of the vehicle-charging infrastructure has been delayed by vendor lock-in and proprietary networks. Among petroleum companies, individual fuel stations are “locked-in,” meaning that the station cannot purchase fuel from a different company or vendor. This forces users to subscribe to the vendors’ services for access, which makes upgrades and expansions needlessly costly and prohibitive.
The conflicting and overlapping jurisdiction between government and industry regulation and incentive have all but stopped EV sales outside of California. A reflection of this reality is that most zero-emission vehicles in the U.S. are exclusively available in California, including the Fiat 500e and the Honda Fit EV.
“The usual suspects”
However, the pushback against clean energy and zero-emissions may not simply be an issue of infrastructure. In a tug-of-war concerning climate change and fossil fuels, it’s typically considered wise to look for “the usual suspects.” According to documents obtained by the Guardian, the American Legislative Exchange Council intends to promote legislation in the upcoming year that will penalize homeowners who use renewable energies, weaken state clean energy regulations and block the Environmental Protection Agency from cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
Among the model legislation that ALEC is promoting is a surcharge for residential customers who feed surplus electricity back into the grid from home-installed solar panels and wind turbines.
«As it stands now, those direct generation customers are essentially freeriders on the system. They are not paying for the infrastructure they are using. In effect, all the other non-direct generation customers are being penalized,» John Eick, legislative analyst for ALEC’s energy, environment and agriculture program, told the Guardian. «How are they going to get that electricity from their solar panel to somebody else’s house? They should be paying to distribute the surplus electricity.»
In November, Arizona became the first state to adapt ALEC’s call to charge customers for installing solar panels. But the fee, $5 per month on average, was far less than what the electric utility sought, which could have added up to $100 a month to customers’ bills.
According to an analysis by the Center for Media and Democracy, ALEC sponsored more than 77 energy bills in 34 states last year, aimed at pushing through Keystone XL, overturning oversight on fracking and opposing renewable energy standards. The largest of ALEC’s targets, however, is the Renewable Portfolio Standards, which calls on electricity producers to source a portion of their electricity from renewable sources. So far, 30 states have embraced RPS, and in 2012 ALEC modelled legislation to specifically repeal the standards.
“After the Electricity Freedom Act (an act that would repeal a state’s renewable energy mandate) became ALEC model policy, approximately 15 states across the country introduced legislation to reform, freeze or repeal their state’s renewable mandate,» the task force document said. «This legislative year has seen the most action on renewable mandates to date.”
Despite strong pushes from conservatives in North Carolina, Ohio and Kansas to get the legislation through, to date, none of the efforts have passed.
Pushing back against the pushback
Campbell Soup, which conducts much of its production in Ohio, came out against Ohio Senate Bill 58, which would have embraced ALEC’s call to reduce the clean energy quota in the state.
“Today, 8% of Campbell’s global electric power is being sourced by renewable energy, including 33,000 solar panels at our facilities around the world,” a Campbell press release reads. “We are actively pursuing other opportunities to reduce our environmental footprint and manage our energy cost and efficiency. This is a commitment not only to our stakeholders’ interests in sustainability; it’s a smart business move.”
Ohio SB 58 never reached the Senate floor and was permanently tabled.
ALEC has also introduced legislation that would allow a state to meet its renewable energy quota by importing clean energy from out-of-state, preventing in-state producers from having to invest in green infrastructure.
«What we saw in 2013 was an attempt to repeal RPS laws, and when that failed … what we are seeing now is a strategy that appears to be pro-clean energy but would actually weaken those pro- clean energy laws by retreating to the lowest common denominator,» Gabe Elsner, director of the Energy and Policy Institute, told the Guardian.
Also proposed by ALEC is legislation that would deny the EPA the ability to shut down a fracking, gas or oil industry facility or well.
«The legislature declares that the United States Environmental Protection Agency … lacks the authority to deny permits of operation to these oil and gas wells and facilities,» the bill reads.
Last September, the EPA proposed new standards for power plants, which account for 40 percent of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions, with additional limits due by June.
«It just shows that ALEC uses lawmakers as lobbyists to block climate legislation at every turn,» said Connor Gibson, a researcher for Greenpeace. «They try to undermine the authority of agencies that have the power potentially to control carbon pollution, so whenever there is a new EPA rule that pops up, they re-tool their arsenal of model bills to make sure they are blocking the new rule.»
Ultimately, the future of clean energy — via zero-emission vehicles or low-emission power generation — depends on money. Those who are invested in coal and oil will be increasingly desperate and vocal about protecting their interests and denying the advancement of alternatives that will ultimately harm their bottom line.
While the arrest of Kamooneh may have more to do with heightened egos and less to do with actual theft, the lack of development of EV infrastructure, pushback from the oil and coal industries that trivialize and condemn clean energy initiatives, and a lack of public outreach to help raise awareness all contributed to this small piece of drama near Atlanta.
But ultimately, the responsibility for preventing the world’s addiction to fossil fuels — which has altered the global climate, disrupted national economies and infringed on the health of entire communities — belongs to society.