Jon Sanders

Businesses make business decisions for business reasons. If they can get free money from politicians wanting to look good in press releases and photo ops, great, but it's rare that it's a deciding factor.

Can you imagine being the kind of person who actually wants to make poor people poorer, deliberately, having convinced yourself it'll make them so poor they'll choose "properly"?

North Carolinians are really stuck because we have the highest rates in the Southeast for QFs, the longest contracts in the Southeast for QFs, fixed rates, and 60 percent of the nation's QFs.

In the ensuing decades, deregulation, open access, a multitude of state and federal incentives for solar and wind power, and the onset of fracking have dramatically changed the energy scene here. Domestic energy resources are plentiful.

Plutarch goes on to explain that these table philosophers, the forerunners to our haranguing political proselytizers, "annoy most people" and prompt the others to acts of rudeness to drown them out.

Even as solar advocates boasted that solar's costs are plummeting, North Carolina's PURPA terms were locking state ratepayers into a situation where they're forced to buy all solar energy produced at exorbitant costs that go well past the actual production costs. It's a great way to make money, but no way to treat captive consumers of a vital necessity.

"Market competition"? The renewable energy industry has made it crystal clear that they want nothing to do with market competition or anything near it. Their own advocates attest that their industry cannot survey without all kinds of government help.

More housing options (including granny flats, garage units, and multiple dwelling units per residence, not just apartments and townhomes) would relax  upward pressure on housing prices. But they would certain not prevent a neighborhood from changing.