While Democrats in the state Legislature and Governor Jerry Brown debate how to spend our state’s budget surplus, they continue to push policies that bust the budgets of ordinary California families.
The California Energy Commission’s mandate that all new homes in California include a minimum $10,000 solar panel system is the latest such attack. With this mandate, the governor’s hand-picked commission has priced out 150,000 California homebuyers.
Why? Because the National Association of Home Builders says that for every $1,000 increase in the price of a home, 15,000 buyers are priced out of the market. So this one action by the Energy Commission will shut out 150,000 Californians from buying a home.
And even that $10,000 is a shameful government fiction. New solar arrays average more than $19,000 in California now, and larger homes could cost double that. California’s “solar tax” could be forcing hundreds of thousands of people into a permanent renter class and barring the door to the American Dream.
With the new gas-tax forcing prices up toward $4 a gallon, “cap-and-trade” taxes pushing electricity rates 50-percent higher than the national average, and the cost of renting or buying a home continuing to spiral out of control, the once Golden State now is home to a quarter of the nation’s homeless population – 134,000 people who can’t afford to have a roof over their heads – solar or not.
This isn’t how our government is supposed to work. Your state and local representative is supposed to figure out ways to make life better for their community, not come up with umpteen-hundred ways to see just how much more money they can pluck from your wallet.
The solar panel mandate is just one more example of the Democrats’ endless experiments in social engineering.
You deserve better than this.
State Senator Ted Gaines represents the people of the 1st Senate District, which includes all or parts of Alpine, El Dorado, Lassen, Modoc, Nevada, Placer, Plumas, Sacramento, Shasta, Sierra and Siskiyou counties. He currently serves as the vice chair of the Senate Insurance and Environmental Quality Committees. He is also a member of the Transportation and Housing and the Governmental Organization Committees.
Gee you think the voters putting Democrats in office would wake up to the reality of their wallets. Not so….. They depend on Utopian junk. What are they going to do now that Hawaii and Guatemala have produced more green house gases then all of the human activity for 2 years and have not stopped?
Soar feeding back into the grid…hummm what happens with an emergency and the grid is intentionally shut down? How do you turn off these panels from feeding into potentially broken lines? Questions questions questions.
Like how can you vote for a Democrat that wants to pass more taxes and hurt the middle and lower classes in the process?
Soar=Solar sorry
Perfect next step to the Democrats’ longed for 2-class society of haves and expendable dependents.
Note: the legislation did not specify the minimum size of the panel array, only its minimum cost. that mistaken focus is apparently typical of the liberal who wants their agenda above, or in spite of, good common sense
Gavin Nuisance claims to prioritize affordability in his campaign for Governor, while ISO is talking scarcity on the electrical grid due to reductions in hydroelectric capacity. It’s challenging to communicate across such a large and benevolent government – so they make it larger.
Hmmm. So the California Energy Commission, a creation of the Executive Branch, MANDATES solar arrays. What happened to the separation of powers doctrine. Who delegated that commission to mandate anything? It is prohibited by the US Constitution, but maybe California’s constitution is different. Sounds like grounds for a class-action lawsuit.
Our masters in Sack-0-Tomatoes believe that THIS TIME it will be different. Australia is facing massive blackouts because of lack of coal fired plants in their quest to be ‘green’. Germany is getting away from the ‘green’ nonsense as they finally realize that it’s a huge waste of resources and land and MONEY. I have a solar array and it took almost 12 years for it to pay for itself…THEN my Inverter dies and added another $2,500 into replacement. How about we build more hydro, because we need the water … preferably to drown the fools in Sack-0-Tomatoes and to provide energy. Even the saner greenies are thinking Nukes aren’t a bad thing.
Great post and the only water projects that should be paid through general obligation bonds should be for water storage.
All other projects can be funded through end users in their own region.
We won’t need electricity when we become just like Tijuana.
Right now, in the town I live in which is Paradise CA. if you go over a certain level of renovation/repair to your home, you must upgrade your septic system adding cost. In Pacifica, a friend had to add interior sprinkler system for major home upgrade. So in near future, is it too hard to imagine before you sell your older home, solar retrofit will be required before sale is “approved”?
The “socialist utopia” that the Democrats promise is now out of reach. The environmentalists nirvana of Solar-powered homes is a “Alice-in-wonderland” story.