Is It Legal to Save Energy? Well, Maybe ...(Austin TX)

http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2006-03-17/pols_feature5.html

It was such a brilliant idea: Take one funny-lookin' solar-powered house efficient enough to generate excess electricity, hook it up to a less-efficient bungalow, and pass clean energy from house to house as easily as you could a cup of sugar. That was the idea Bo McCarver of the Blackland Community Development Corporation had for a pair of homes on Leona Street in East Austin. It was brilliant! At least, until he unveiled the idea to Austin Energy. That's when the hopes started to dim. "I'm satisfied that the folks down with Austin Energy are good people," said McCarver, "but we've got a strange law that will not let us move the energy here 15 feet to another low-income family."

Leona is in the Blackland neighborhood, just east of I-35 and just south of Manor Road. It's a historically African-American community that was the site of one of the first big gentrification fights in East Austin, when UT grabbed and demolished a block of homes to add to its facilities in the 1980s. McCarver's been fighting to preserve affordability ever since. The CDC now owns about half the single-family homes and duplexes in the neighborhood, which it rents (but, to prevent flipping, does not sell) to residents making up to 50% of the local median family income.

On a recent windy afternoon, McCarver was standing between a pair of houses. On the left is a weathered bungalow, Minnie Harden's old house – she's passed on, but that's what everyone still calls it. On the right is a structure everyone calls the "Solar D." It was designed and built by UT School of Architecture students for the Solar Decathlon, a sustainable design contest in Washington, D.C., last fall. (They placed fifth.) The house is angular, glassy, and at about 600 square feet, very compact. Inside it's all honey wood and stainless steel: IKEA meets Metropolis magazine.

McCarver is no metrosexual – he's a tall, bearded gentleman of the talkative-Texan genotype – but he is a longtime fan of solar energy. The Blackland community center has a 12-year-old solar system that fuels six tiny cottages known as Robert Shaw Village, cutting electricity bills of the elderly residents by one-third. "Some of the people we work with have virtually no income," he said. "We want to keep their rent down, and also keep their utilities down."

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The People have been economically 'sliced and diced' in every conceivable way by the corporatists.

I can sort of see how it happened, but I hope they get it straightened out OK.

The "stick it to The Man" side of me rather likes the idea of people becoming their own micro-power companies. But it just occurred to me that it creates opportunities for safety hazards from do-it-yourself-ers. People already get killed doing their own electrical work, I wonder what might happen if people start fooling around with more "industrial" quantities of electrons.

selling power back to the grid is complex and poses many dangers for the professionals who service the lines.

They don't "island" during blackouts and are not a safety hazard to linemen...

http://www.txses.org/PVgrid.php

OFF THE GRID so they can tell the utilities and bureaucrats to go suck an egg, IMHO.