By RICK NEBEL
Los Alamos

Several years ago, my wife Kathy and my son Dan worked for Carol and Tex Felts at Los Alamos Music. Like many small businesses they provided multiple services to the community. They gave music lessons. They sold new and used instruments. They did “rent-to-own” instruments for beginners. They repaired instruments. However, the real money-maker for that business was that Tex tuned pianos.

For many years, Tex had a contract with the County to tune its pianos. One year he put in his usual bid, and the County told him that they had awarded the contract to some outfit from Santa  Fe. They had underbid him by one dollar. One stinking dollar.

A few months later, Tex got a call from the County asking him if he would mind tuning a piano for them.   Apparently, a world-class pianist was scheduled to give a concert in Los Alamos and the piano was out of tune. Tex reminded them that they had already paid someone to tune that piano and the government shouldn’t be paying twice for the same service. They told Tex that the concert was in a few hours and their piano tuning outfit in Santa Fe couldn’t shake someone loose to do the job. Tex told the County that they were putting him in an awkward position in that it would look like he was trying to horn in on his competitor’s contract. Tex didn’t tune the piano and the citizens of Los Alamos got to hear a world-class pianist give a concert on an out of tune piano. All for one stinking dollar.

The reason I am telling this story is that the County can be a little tone deaf when it comes to dealing with local businesses. Recently the County changed their electricity billing algorithm so that customers with solar installations are only reimbursed at the wholesale rate and not the retail rate. I understand (and for the most part I agree with) the County’s rationale that their non-solar customers were effectively subsidizing their solar ones. I expected the rate change to happen so it didn’t surprise me much.  However, it knocked the snot out of the local businesses who were installing solar.

Now, the DPU board is considering buying into a solar array from Farmington. My suggestion is that they consider shopping local for their solar power. There is plenty of space to produce our own power here in Los Alamos, either on the rooftops of County buildings or through ground-based solar arrays (which is probably cheaper). They could contract to these people who have been hurt by the DPU billing policies.  That way, we would also keep local solar expertise to service and maintain these installations. And, people’s utility bill revenues would stay in the County.

I believe that the solar array/transmission line model which the DPU board is suggesting is a technology that is becoming obsolete. The reason is because the transmission lines can no longer deliver reliable power. PNM has already shut off power to customers in Southeastern NM and Raton due to wind events.  They are scared of starting fires, and rightfully so. PGE in California went bankrupt over the fires they started, and PNM has a fiduciary responsibility to their investors and the public not to let that happen here. Earlier this year, they cut Los Alamos back from two trunk lines to one trunk line and threatened to cut our power off altogether if that line had problems. I think this situation is likely to get worse.

One major advantage of local solar over imported solar is that you don’t have the transmission line power issue. Since you consume the power where you produce it, you don’t need long distance power lines. If the DPU and the solar people can cooperate on this, it would be to everyone’s benefit.