Ripping up the astroturf:

The attack dogs in this war are funded by Koch Industries and include Americans for Prosperity, American Energy Alliance and the American Legislative Exchange Council. They frame their attacks as a defense of the free market and fiscal conservatism. Yet even a cursory examination of their positions reveals they’re not defending the free market but attempting to protect the fossil fuel industry from competition.

Not sure if this Conservative's opinion signals a movement growing or is simply an anomaly, but the fossil fuel industry's actions are blatantly obvious. Harnessing clean, renewable energy resources like Solar has been a wildly popular idea for decades, and now that we're finally seeing a massive surge in installations, any pushback on that is liable to carry a heavy political price. One can hope, anyway.

If it works, break it, and if it doesn't work, institutionalize it:

In 2013, the General Assembly passed a pilot program to put SolarBees on Jordan Lake to churn up harmful algae. The results of that program should be available later this year.

The Senate version of the budget would expand the in-lake strategy to other impaired bodies of water, such as Falls Lake.

Why (you might ask) would the normally penny-pinching Senate want to expand the use and associated funding of a technology that has yet to prove itself? The answer is pretty simple. It was merely a distraction to begin with, so whether it works or not is tangential at best. The true goal was to continue to delay implementation of the Jordan Lake Rules, while also doing away with riparian buffers and other sound stormwater runoff abatement practices. Evidence of the uselessness of SolarBees was readily available before they got their little floaters wet in Jordan Lake: