Using tomatoes to attack solar power, a Kentucky lawmaker pulls from big business playbook

When Rep. Jim Gooch took to the floor of the Kentucky House of Representatives last week to link tomatoes and solar power, some people in the chamber chuckled and others looked baffled.

It turns out his speech wasn’t exactly homegrown.

The veteran lawmaker from western Kentucky spoke of his love of tomatoes and how he bought them daily from "Grocer Bob."

How Bob was delivering him tomatoes "24 hours a day, seven days a week," and how that was getting expensive.

How Gooch discovered that he could get a tax break on equipment to grow his own tomatoes, and how he started doing that. And then how he was growing so many tomatoes that he needed to get rid of some.

He found out, the story went on, that because of a law he could sell all the tomatoes he didn't need and that Grocer Bob would be forced to pay him the retail price — thereby cheating Bob of profits.

Related: Who's behind the push to crush solar power in Kentucky?

Just substitute electrons for tomatoes, Gooch said, and you have the current issue over net metering, the arrangement where people in Kentucky with solar panels can get their utilities like LG&E to give them credit at the retail rate for any extra electricity they produce. It's really cheating the little guy, Gooch argued.

"I will never stand for the poor people who are less fortunate having to subsidize people who have a little better station in life," Gooch concluded.

Setting aside the subsidy question for a moment because it's hotly disputed, some people might wonder how Gooch came up with his creative gardening story.

As it turns out, pretty much the same story — tomatoes and all — can be found in the preface of a 2014 legislative playbook of a national, corporate-backed organization that has been working on behalf of big businesses for years, leaving behind a wake of controversy.

"Imagine you have a home vegetable garden and you have a very good year and a bumper crop of tomatoes," opens the "Reforming Net Metering" report from the Washington, D.C.-based American Legislative Exchange Council. Net metering, it concludes, wrongly forces the grocer — think utility — to buy a wholesale product at retail prices.

Just what is ALEC?

It's an association of state legislators "dedicated to the principles of limited government, free markets and federalism," according to its website. It holds conventions and workshops and develops model policies for states along familiar lines — fewer regulations and less taxes.

More on this: Fledgling solar industry threatened by double punch

The Center for Media and Democracy, a nonprofit that documents corporate influence, has identified fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil and Koch Industries as among ALEC's financial backers. Amid a pressure campaign, dozens of companies including Google and Walmart dropped out, though not always explaining why, according to USA TODAY.

Google could no longer live with ALEC's positions on climate change

"Everyone understands climate change is occurring and the people who oppose it are really hurting our children and our grandchildren and making the world a much worse place," Google chairman Eric Schmidt said in 2014 on NPR, USA TODAY reported. "And so we should not be aligned with such people — they're just, they're just literally lying."

In 2012, the New York Times put in this way: "Special interests effectively turn ALEC’s lawmaker members into stealth lobbyists, providing them with talking points, signaling how they should vote and collaborating on bills affecting hundreds of issues like school vouchers and tobacco taxes."

As for Gooch's House Bill 227, it would cut by about 70 percent the value of the credits utilities must provide to future solar panel owners for any extra electricity they produce, effectively going from a retail to a wholesale rate. Supporters say the bill is just a matter of fairness, while its critics say it threatens to squash a fledgling solar installation industry in Kentucky and kill hundreds of jobs.

Watchdog Earth: Louisville air kills 46 people a year

So are poor, rural people through their electric utility bills really subsidizing rich solar panel owners in Louisville and Lexington, as the debate has been cast in the General Assembly? Are solar panel owners not paying a fair share of their utilities' fixed costs?

Solar power supporters argue no, and no. They point to a 2017 Department of Energy study that such rate impacts will "likely remain negligible for the foreseeable future" for "the vast majority of states and utilities."

The only way to know for sure would be if the Public Service Commission were tasked to investigate. That could work if the PCS sticks with energy issues and leaves the tomatoes in the state Capitol.

Reporter James Bruggers writes this Watchdog Earth blog: 502-582-4645; jbruggers@courier-journal.com; Twitter: @jbruggers; Support strong local journalism by subscribing today: www.courier-journal.com/jamesb.