A Letter to the Editor (in two parts)

Vote NO on Amendment 1!

Published in

From the Diaries of John Henry

10 min readOct 7, 2016

This post is a “letter to the editor” for the Orlando Sentinel, my local paper of record. As the limited real estate of a newspaper traditionally demands brevity and straight text, I will provide here two versions of the letter, the first an abbreviation consistent with standard form for potential newspaper publication, the second an expanded version capturing some of the imagery, hyperlinks, multimedia, and elaboration as afforded by the online medium. The intended audience for this post are the voters of Florida.

Abbreviated letter in newspaper medium form:

Florida residents who would like to see any kind of thriving residential solar economy in our state should vote NO on Amendment 1. One should not take this bill at face value — it actually won a national award for deceptive language in a state ballot amendment from the Clear Language Institute. The bill, which presents itself as pro-solar, is like a duck in sheep’s clothing intending to strengthen the regulatory authority for investor-owned and public utilities — who have already spent over $20 million campaigning for this amendment. The bulk of the language promises to constitutionalize rights that Floridians already enjoy under statute, used as a distraction ploy from its true purpose of granting utilities new authority to increase fees and/or impair the economics of residential solar for Florida homeowners. The whole premise that non-solar residents “subsidize” solar homes is false, and has been disproven in a broad study by the Brookings Institution, a respected non-partisan think tank. As with any amendment or election it helps to consider the sources of campaign funding to reveal who expects to benefit. Utility-backed amendment 1 blocks the sun — vote NO on 1!

Expanded version in Medium medium form:

Florida residents who would like to see any kind of thriving residential solar economy in our state should vote NO on Amendment 1!

Buckwheat Zydeco — Hard to Stop (Live)

In Florida’s founding constitution, there were no provisions for state ballot initiatives. It wasn’t until a new constitution was adopted in 1968 that citizens gained this right, which wasn’t even put to test until 1976. In elections since, the tool of state ballot initiatives has proved a useful venue for citizen groups to inject policy debate in contexts where popular support doesn’t necessarily align with politicians’ appetite for address. The public is less restrained by allegiance to special interests, high value donors, or aversions to controversy than one would expect of a career politician. Thus we have seen several valuable initiatives in Florida over recent election cycles, including capping our childrens’ classroom sizes, indexing our minimum wage to inflation, granting tax benefits to veterans, and even an (unfortunately failed) attempt to legalize medical marijuana (one step at a time). Of course there are trade offs, one suspects that if left to our representatives we may not have had to stomach a constitutional ban on gay marriage in the state but who knows (a reader may be surprised to learn that this author sometimes votes Republican).

That this nation would even become a democracy was not a given, fortunately there were founders like Benjamin Franklin who advocated for the voice of the people to be heard through democratic elections of representatives fueled by a healthy press.

That there are trade offs associated with moving decision making responsibilities from a select few expert representatives to the broad public should not be a surprise. In his book “The Wisdom of Crowds” James Surowiecki, an advocate for using mass aggregation of crowds to facilitate enhanced cognition (picture the expected accuracy of your estimating the number of jelly beans in a jar verses the average of 100 estimates by your peers), describes the point of representative democracy as allowing the same kind of cognitive division of labor that operates in the rest of society (as an example, although we have the right to file our own taxes or represent ourselves in court, it is wise to defer to experts with domain expertise). Successfully avoiding the ‘man with a hammer’ syndrome (google it if you prefer), Surowiecki further points out that those benefits of mass aggregation he touts throughout the book may not be as useful for purposes of policy decisions as that is a different kind of cognition problem, albeit with democracy still preferred to the problems of concentrated power associated with other political systems. Even for the limited extent that mass aggregation provides benefit for policy making, it has been illustrated by others that in general smaller, smarter crowds perform better than larger crowds in aggregation.

Source: The Wisdom of Smaller, Smarter Crowds — Goldstein, McAfee, Suri — Link

Let’s face it, as unpopular as Congress may be, uncovering and deciphering the true meaning of complex or subtle legal language is one area where a domain expert like a career politician may actually be able to provide real value to society. Just as an investor is wise to practice intellectual humility, avoid hubris, and stay within his circle of competence, as citizens if we are going to participate in the direct democracy of ballot initiatives we need to recognize that we cannot always take the language of an initiative at face value. It is an unfortunate trend, but going forward we are likely to see even more instances of the state ballot platform being usurped by special interests intending to use the public’s susceptibility to subtle language to advance their hidden agendas, with manipulation likely to take place not just in the language of the amendments but also in the representation of the backing organizations behind them (hint: the “Consumers for Smart Solar” agenda has very little to do with the interests of solar consumers). In this specific case, the language of the Amendment 1 is so deceiving that the Clear Language Institute, a nonprofit formed specially to encourage transparency and clarity of state ballot amendments up for public vote, has issued a special award for the extent of deception under attempt by the backing utility lobby.

There is a time and a place for subtle language tricks, manipulative imagery, poetry, or jokes; the language of a ballot initiative up for public vote is not one of them.

Floridians for Solar Choice, the true advocates for the residential solar industry in the state, has compared this amendment to a wolf in sheep’s clothing. I think the imagery of a wolf is probably taking things a little far, the bill did make it past the Florida Supreme Court after all (granted by the slimmest of margins on a 4/3 vote, but still). It’s definitely not a sheep though. Perhaps a more accurate analogy would be that this bill is like a duck in sheep’s clothing, a duck-bill-platisheep posing as a friend of residential solar but when you go to shave its wool for the sunny months find that it flies off to summer up north in the cooling tower basin of a natural gas plant.

A duck walks into a drug store looking for some chapstick, asking the pharmacist to “just put it on my bill.”

As with any amendment or election it helps to consider the sources of campaign funding to reveal who expects to benefit. The bill for this deceptive campaign has been considerable. Collectively some of the biggest players in the Florida utility establishment have spent over $20 million on this amendment to date — the most ever spent on a ballot initiative in the state. Does this look like the funding profile of a consumer driven campaign? The answer is NO.

The bulk of the Amendment language promises to constitutionalize rights that Floridians already enjoy, used as a distraction ploy from its true purpose of granting utilities new authority to increase fees and/or impair the economics of residential solar for Florida homeowners. While it is true that Floridians do not have access to third-party power sales under solar leases that have proven so popular in other states, this bill does not address that, the right to lease mentioned here is only for those offered by your local utility, thus in evaluating the language of the bill a voter can effectively ignore all but the last statement as those preceding are only restating rights that already exist.

This amendment establishes a right under Florida’s constitution to own or lease solar equipment installed on their property to generate electricity for their own use. State and local governments shall retain their abilities to protect consumer rights and public health, safety and welfare, and to ensure that consumers who do not choose to install solar are not required to subsidize the costs of backup power and electric grid access to those who do.

The backers were allowed to use the opening phrase of “This Amendment establishes a right” only because they are establishing the rights under the state Constitution for the first time — currently those rights already exist, just under statute, and they are not under jeopardy of change — thus the only thing accomplished by their inclusion is to give the illusion of a pro-solar agenda. The final statement (“ensure that consumers who do not choose to install solar are not required to subsidize the costs”) is where the sleight of hand really comes into play. The idea that residential solar installs are a drain on non-solar consumers, the idea that non-solar consumers are “subsidizing” solar homes in any way, is a faulty premise that has been disproven in a broad study by the Brookings Institution, a respected non-partisan think tank. Residential solar energy is a net cost saver not only to those who have installed panels themselves, but to the entire grid.

So what would our state’s energy future look like if Amendment 1 passes? Some likely outcomes include new fees applied to the bills of solar consumers or possibly even a rescinding of Florida’s net metering policy (the policy which guarantees a consumer may sell a solar home’s excess generation back to their utility). When Nevada tried a similar rescinding of net metering last year they saw a mass exodus of consumer solar companies and jobs from the state, an outcome so unpopular to their citizenry that the policy change appears likely to be reversed in the coming weeks. Florida’s power generation mix is currently dominated by natural gas and nuclear power. Unlike most states, we lack a Renewable Portfolio Standard which would require our utilities to incorporate a set portion of renewable energy into their generation mix — these policies are less popular in the southeast largely due to less pronounced onshore wind resources making wind power less economically viable. But what Florida lacks in wind resources we more than make up for in solar potential. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) estimates potential for >40% of our generation mix from rooftop solar due to our high density of housing and favorable solar conditions — one of the highest figures in the nation. But despite these advantages we only rank middle of the pack (18th) in total installed capacity. For the third most populous state and one of the highest potential rooftop solar penetration rates this status quo is completely unacceptable. Solar energy enjoys wide bipartisan support of our residents, for this Amendment 1 the Utility lobby is spending tremendous resources trying to divert that support into counterproductive policy using deceptive language and practices. If they do succeed and this amendment passes, not only will our solar economy be throttled, but I speculate that we could even see rate hikes for the then necessary new construction of gas and nuclear plants to offset the reduction in future solar installations.

Of the states currently lacking a Renewable Portfolio Standard, Florida has the highest potential for rooftop solar penetration by far. We need a Renewable Portfolio Standard of our own.

I can’t help but wonder what our nation’s founders would think of the predicament the states are finding ourselves in with these misleading and manipulative ballot initiatives. I suspect Benjamin Franklin would have been particularly interested in the outcome of Amendment 1. In addition to his role of one of our country’s original newspaperman / blogger, he also advanced scientific progress in the realm of electricity and physics to a degree at least on par with Faraday and Maxwell, identifying the law for conservation of charge and inventing batteries and the lightning rod along the way (I understand he also liked to fly kites). If he were here I picture him using his newspaper blogging platform to remind us that small strokes fell great oaks or to lecture us on how change for the sake of change can be a good thing, but should rarely be entered into blindly. With stakes as high as our economy, energy security, and the rapidly closing window for opportunity to mitigate the impact of climate change on the line, an effective democracy requires an educated citizenry relying on the freedom of speech and of the press so that we know what we’re voting for, voters maintaining a healthy sense of skepticism, and for God’s sake not allowing ourselves to be manipulated into putting more power into the hands of a monopoly, wolf, or demagogue.