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This is the Jan. 14, 2021, edition of Boiling Point, a weekly newsletter about climate change and the environment in California and the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
As rooftop solar power has gotten cheaper and more useful — a topic I wrote about last week — a powerful industry has pushed back. I’m talking about utilities, the state-sanctioned monopolies that build poles and wires and sell us electricity from centralized power plants, earning large guaranteed profits in the process.
Jonathan Scott is no fan of that industry.
If you haven’t spent much time watching HGTV — and full disclosure, I have not — Scott co-hosts “Property Brothers,” which features him and his twin brother, Drew, buying and renovating houses on a budget. He’s also a Las Vegas resident who put solar panels on his home and got pretty pissed when state officials allowed a monopoly utility owned by Warren Buffett to gut its “net metering” program, which compensates solar customers for the electricity they produce.