How Los Angeles became the first 100% solar powered city in the US. Once upon a time, not too long ago, in my lifetime, the image of LA was of a smog filled city, near Hollywood, where the air was too thick to breath. People were chopping up LA air, packaging it and selling it as door-stops. But now in 2014, LA is fast becoming the first 100% solar powered city in the US, where all the electric street cars, buildings, schools and Tesla electric cars are powered by solar energy. An ideas solar city is rising out of the ashes of coal & oil. It won't happen this year, but die has been cast, and the people of LA are rising to meet the challenge. This is the tail that is waging the dog. What happened? A young man named Hermann Scheer wrote a few books on the "Solar Economy" in the 90's, following Chernobyl. He believed it was possible to shift the world economy from nukes to solar & wind with a policy, a law, that gave power to the 99%. Scheer's law did shift power from the 1%, using a unique form of Jiujitsu, where the Utility company became a farmers market. Five environmental activists in LA decided to apply what they had learned from Hermann Scheer, and shift economy of California from oil to solar, by first making LA a solar powered city. Their vision was that would then help shift the whole US economy to solar. The 5 activists were scared that the world would soon be drowning in its own waste, so they set about drafting a solar feed-in tariff payment policy for LA that requires the Utility to pay anyone who fed solar onto the grid $0.17 kwh. This, the five believed would, save LA from the smog / CO2 and stop the polar ice caps from melting. That was the plan. The actual history is not clear, but it seems to have also been inspired by President Ronald Reagan ripping the solar panels off the White House. Which, of course, as everyone now knows, directly caused the hurricane than destroyed the Philippines in 2013. A funny thing happened on the way to saving the world. While LA was stumbling towards solar,.... a small farming village, Wildpoldseird, Germany suddenly leaped into the forefront of the media, by producing 333% more solar than it uses. Last year those few farmers in that one town made $6 million! Six million! This set the new world standard for solar buzz. How could they? They did it by offering to pay $0.99 kwh to anyone feeding solar onto the grid. Ninty nine cents? Do the math. That means a farmer could make $60,000. a year extra just by feeding solar onto the grid. That is more than farmers were making from raising eggs or chickens. Suddenly everyone with a barn roof was signing contracts with the government to require the Utility to pay them $0.99 kwh for solar. Solar was suddenly hot! Very hot in cold, cloudy Germany. This race between sunny LA & cloudy Germany became the stuff of legends. A new movie, now free on Youtube came out about this Germany gold rush for solar: "Here Comes the Sun - Scheer". Across this golden stage of solar money, dozens of world leaders began singing their own version of the song, "Here Comes the Sun", but few of them took the time to first read the Bible, "Energy Imperative" by Hermann ( & the Hermits ) Scheer. Too bad. Those who did actually read the book, which reads like a road map of how to get from an oily, smoggy world to a clean, green sunny world, where energy is free, nukes are no more, and there is full employment, were able to reap the fully bounty of solar. One sterling example was Prime Minister Naoto Kan of Japan. Kan read Scheer's book and applied the road map to Japan. He found it worked as perfectly in Japan as it had in Germany. Suddenly Japan was able to find a sunny way out from under the yoke of its own nuclear disaster. Suddenly Japan became the land of the rising sun. Kan, recognizing the world was facing a climate emergency, after the triple meltdown in Fukushima, so Kan wrote the law the require Utilities to pay a whopping $0.53 kwh to anyone feeding solar onto the grid. It worked. Japan leaped from being a slave of GE to being the new sun-land of Asia. At the same time, people were fleeing Japan in droves to Brazil, as it appeared Fukushima was about the melt down, once again, during the repair project. The wheel is still spinning. We do not know what will happen in Japan or in LA. Will solar advocates actually be able to reverse climate change fast enough to stop air pollution from strangling every person on earth by 2020? We do know that Germany now has the cleanest air on earth, thanks to its solar feed-in tariff payment policy that now pays $0.54 kwh to those who buy solar panels and feed their surplus onto the grid.

• published: 07 Jan 2014
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