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Going green in oil country: Meet the Godfather of Solar
Solar panels cover the roof of a Sam's Club store in Glendora, Calif.
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TEXT OF STORY
Bill Radke: The letters "B.P." have become synonymous with Gulf oil spill. But remember when they were supposed to stand for "Beyond Petroleum"? Well, even in the heart of oil country, there are some unlikely folks who are thinking "beyond petroleum." Yesterday, we heard from a Texas oil man who's gone green. Today, we meet a Louisiana native who set his state up with the strongest solar tax rebates in the nation. Here's Marketplace's Krissy Clark.
Krissy Clark: This is the story of how Nick Gautraux went from being a newly elected state senator for an oil-loving district in southern Louisiana to this:
Nick Gautraux: They call me the Godfather of Solar.
It's a mantle he's not entirely comfortable with.
Gautraux: Because it's associated with, and I'll be honest with you, they call them tree huggers. When you talk about green, they think about a tree hugger.
And Gautreaux says in Cajun country, it's not trees, but oil rigs that people embrace, and the jobs that come with them. No tree-hugging was involved in the making of the Godfather of Solar. What was involved was a phone-call, that Gautreaux got soon after he got elected. The guy on the other line was the son of his first grade teacher.
Gautreaux: . . . and he says look, I'm building a subdivision, does the state have any type of tax incentives that would help me put solar hot water heaters on these homes? And I said, no, we don't have any thing.
And then Gautreaux thought, maybe they should. He knew nothnig about solar energy, but he had friends who'd served in Iraq... and he figured anything to help reduce our dependence on foreign oil was a good thing.
Gautreaux: You know what, Louisiana's the leader in the oil and gas industry, why can't we be the leader in alternative energy?
So, he wrote a bill -- the strongest in the nation: a state tax rebate for homeowners that cut the cost of installing solar panels in half. But when it started moving through the state legislature, he got more phone calls, this time from people he'd never met, in the national environmental movement. They wanted to help lobby for the bill.
Gautreaux: I put all these people in my iPhone as "solar". I just type in solar and they all pop up. And they were saying, man, you just don't know what you've got there, we're going to come testify in favor of it. And I said, guys, just sit in the background, because I'm afraid when there's too many people testifying, all of a sudden it draws attention.
And so, quietly, in 2007, Gautreaux got the bill passed. Since then, about a hundred solar businesses have cropped up in Louisiana -- bringing a whole new set of jobs to the economy. Just don't call them green.
Gautreaux: Just talk about good-paying jobs. Let's stop the green jobs, cause listen. In the oil and gas industry, you hear good paying jobs. Why do jobs need a color?
I'm Krissy Clark for Marketplace.
Thank you for having an "oil" politician talk about alternative energy, especially one serving in a state so recently devastated by Big Oil.
New technology means new jobs; new jobs means new taxes, which are things this unemployed, underfunded country could use right about now. And innovation breeds innovation, something this country used to run at with open arms but now stands aside in skepticism while the rest of the world surges ahead.
Solar powered homes supply power for electric cars. Solar is reliable, safe, easy to maintain. None of that can be said of petroleum which is dangerous to produce, risky to transport and toxic to consume.
On-site, renewable, long-term energy sources that free us from monopolies such as the DWPs and Enrons of our country are a good thing. Being able to separate ourselves from those companies, along with BP, Exxon, Shell and countries with values shunned by Democracies, such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, China would be welcomed by many Americans.
Now let's get moving on methane gas generators to responsibly deal with our waste instead of pumping into the oceans, ocean friction and wind power to continue our journey to having clean, safe, renewable power.
Gautreaux makes a great point here. It seems to me that so much of the opposition to alternative energy is the "tree-hugger" stigma attached to it. We've heard the environmental-based arguments for so long that they don't seem to carry nearly as much weight anymore - and they certainly aren't going to convince people who are entrenched in opposition. As important as it is, the "environment" is just too nebulous a concept for many people to get behind. The movement will only start to gain real ground when the argument becomes mostly an economical one.
Thanks for your comments. Petroleum is used in generating a small but significant part of electricity in the U.S. – just over 1%. You can find out more from the Department of Energy’s statistics, here:
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=electricity_in_t...
Electric plants that run on petroleum often use what’s called “residual fuel oil,†a product refined from crude oil.
As some of the comments on this series have mentioned, natural gas fuels a larger share of our electric plants in the U.S.—about 20%. Natural gas is obviously one of the key products extracted by the gulf oil and gas industry, a major backbone of the economy where Nolan Hart and Nick Gautreaux live. Despite that fact, Hart and Gautreaux are looking to shift to more renewable sources.
This concerns Krissy Clark's report on August 12, 2010 Marketplace titled " Going green in oil country , meet the godfather of solar". During the report reporter Clark stated in regard to solar panels that " -- and anything that would reduce our dependence on foreign oil would be a good thing." This statement is quite similar to a statement a few days ago in a similar piece about a former oil worker now living in Austin Texas reducing his dependence on foreign oil by his installation of solar panels. These repeated reports that solar panels will reduce our dependence on foreign oil are just not true. Oil either foreign or domestic is not used as a fuel to generate electricity. Let's take your former oil worker living in Austin, Texas. Austin Energy gets its power from plants that use coal, nuclear, natural gas and a few per cent wind/solar. They use no oil as a generating fuel so all the solar panels in the world will not reduce their dependence. If we look at generation sources nationwide we see the same pattern with the introduction of water power in some areas. Oil is mainly a transportation fuel and our aircraft, trucks and even autos will be dependent on it for the foreseeable future. Why then does reporter Clark continue to mislead her listeners?
