Ed Setzler of Acworth dropped a bomb on the house floor yesterday. He has submitted a bill that would repeal the Transportation Investment Act and replace it with another. The new one would basically be a ten-year SPLOST program voted on and administered by individual counties. There is a matching resolution. This will probably go nowhere.
An amendment to existing law to provide for distributed power generation was dropped by Jason Carter yesterday. I’m wholly in support of it, but I find one particular piece of it puzzling:
(5) ‘Distributed generation facility’ means a facility provided by or for a customer generator for the production of electrical energy that:
(A) Uses a solar photovoltaic system; fuel cell; generator fueled by biomass, municipal solid waste, landfill gas, hydropower; or wind turbine;
Note that you could not be part of a ‘distributed generation facility’ if you were using a fossil fuel of some sort.
I laud the efforts to push for more sustainable energy sources, but why deliberately cut out someone’s option to use fuel oil? The whole point to this is “…primarily to offset part or all of the customer generator’s requirements for electricity.” If a customer generator wants to do it, let them! If they can use diesel or gasoline or natural gas in a way that competes economically with Georgia Power, we should be encouraging that.
And lastly for today, on the Theme of transportation and energy, is Senate Resolution 819 – Creating the Senate Alternative Sustainable Transportation Study Committee. This has bipartisan support and was cosigned by the chair and vice chair of the transportation committee, so I expect it to at least clear the Ssenate.
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