John Farrell ☀️🌬🔋

Distributed energy nerd | Anti-monopoly policy guy @ ILSR | Making clean power local + fair | 📍Minnesota dad energy 🔌💡

[John Farrell ☀️🌬🔋 @johnffarrell]

What the #Monopoly #Utility Model Really Costs Us –– a thread on my new report from @ILSR 🧵

Care about #CleanEnergy? #Climate? #Affordability? #Equity? There's something for you >>> #EnergyTwitter

[John Farrell ☀️🌬🔋 @johnffarrell]

Learn more about the odd discrepancy between state level project approval but federal price setting from my great podcast with @ClaireWayner: https://t.co/RvmcGg1gCs

[John Farrell ☀️🌬🔋 @johnffarrell]

Six New England governors demand that the feds do their part to rein in utility profits, but cutting excessive rates of return on transmission lines: https://t.co/pBJ0KxYOOn

[John Farrell ☀️🌬🔋 @johnffarrell]

Only Trump could have found a way to 10x the level of corruption.

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

February 10: Trump buys up to $5 million in Dell stock.

Nine days later he’s telling a rally crowd to “go out and buy a Dell computer.”

All spring, he praises the company at public events.

This week: The Pentagon hands Dell a $9.7 billion contract.

Dell’s stock surges.

The President of the United States profits.

This is not a coincidence. This is not a gray area. A president used the bully pulpit to pump a stock he personally owned, then his administration steered nearly ten billion taxpayer dollars to that same company.

He did the same with Microsoft and Amazon, buying in months before the Pentagon announced deals to deploy their tech. His assets sit in a trust run by his own children, who know exactly what he holds.

Presidents are exempt from the conflict-of-interest laws that bind every other federal employee. That has to change. We rely on a president’s integrity instead of the law, and this president has shown us exactly what that’s worth.

We’ve got to ban this.

The American people deserve a government that works for them, not one man’s portfolio.
https://t.co/2FpeDECmxN

[John Farrell ☀️🌬🔋 @johnffarrell]

Food deserts and high grocery prices spring from a consolidated food chain. This piece by Claire and Sandeep explains how we can enforce the laws to fight back.

[Claire Kelloway @clairekelloway]

In the @nytopinion today with @sandeepvaheesan making the case for genuine antitrust action in the food system, not just rhetoric. https://t.co/oCR2JUXHP9

[David Pomerantz @DavidPomerantz]

NextEra hometown newspaper ed board, (basically): “Trust us Virginia: don’t let this company anywhere near your electricity customers.”

[John Farrell ☀️🌬🔋 @johnffarrell]

@WGLTNews Listen to my interview with Maria Sipin about the Portland Clean Energy Fund: https://t.co/QmbPiDxMU1

[John Farrell ☀️🌬🔋 @johnffarrell]

A city taxing large retailers 1% to fund community solar, free AC for low-income households, and clean energy job training. Turns out when communities design the policy, they build things that actually help people. https://t.co/IKaUbZQsHh via Monica Samayoa @WGLTNews

[John Farrell ☀️🌬🔋 @johnffarrell]

Why cool schools for kids when you can give cool cash to overpaid utility companies? 🙄

[Dr. Leah C. Stokes [email protected] @leahstokes]

California could hand over $200 million meant to cool kids' classrooms to utilities.

That money was promised to schools through CalSHAPE — a program Gov. Newsom helped create. With heat waves in winter, kids need cool classrooms.

My latest in @latimes.
https://t.co/TE1jrDpzRh

[John Farrell ☀️🌬🔋 @johnffarrell]

@CanaryMedia https://t.co/cuJSDM7Eb6

[John Farrell ☀️🌬🔋 @johnffarrell]

A powerful new tool to get clean energy on the grid, modeled in California: Limited Generation Profile. If you can flex to local grid capacity, you can come online. And of course, top notch coverage from @jeffstjohn @canarymedia:

[John Farrell ☀️🌬🔋 @johnffarrell]

Apparently, the best way to address Lyme disease is to give a hoot about it.

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

If you're worried about ticks, put up an owl box.

The animal driving most Lyme disease in the eastern US is the white-footed mouse. Ticks that feed on them are far more likely to come away infected than ticks that feed on other animals. The bigger the local mouse population, the worse the next year's tick year.

A single barred owl pair raising chicks can take hundreds of rodents in a breeding season. Owls also don't carry Lyme. The bacterium can't survive their digestive tract, so an owl that eats an infected mouse is a dead end for the disease.

Researchers at the Cary Institute, the leading lab on Lyme ecology, have been explicit about this: "Landscapes that support predators have reduced Lyme disease risk."

One owl box on its own isn't going to fix a tick year. But a yard with owls, foxes, bobcats, and weasels in it has fewer mice, and a yard with fewer mice has fewer infected ticks.

If you have woods or fields nearby, a properly sized barn owl or screech owl box (different species, different boxes) is one of the most useful single things you can do for tick exposure at the landscape scale. Match the box to the owl that lives near you.

The mouse is the problem, owls are the solution.

[John Farrell ☀️🌬🔋 @johnffarrell]

Consumers: we need relief from high rates, driven by excessive utility profits and poorly regulated monopolies

Utilities: let's dispose of competitive bidding for new transmission lines

[Matt Stoller @matthewstoller]

Massive fight by incumbent utilities to block competition in building interstate transmission, basically really long high-tech extension cords. https://t.co/hY3pFiQMK2

[John Farrell ☀️🌬🔋 @johnffarrell]

W.T.F.

[U.S. Department of Education @usedgov]

SKILLS THAT PAY OFF.

[Energy and Policy Institute @EnergyandPolicy]

You’ve heard of monopolies, but what about megamonopolies? Get ready, because that’s what could happen if NextEra gets approval to acquire Dominion Energy, whose CEOs are some of the highest paid in the industry. Now their customers could pay the price. https://t.co/ROlCTXLJVR

[John Farrell ☀️🌬🔋 @johnffarrell]

When their profit maximization plans must go through even the scantest of public review, utilities will effectively bribe community organizations to support mergers with grossly unequal benefits for shareholders versus ordinary people. There's no other way to get approval.

[David Pomerantz @DavidPomerantz]

Here's what's happening in Virginia right now: dozens of Dominion employees w/ titles like "Community Relations Manager" are fanning out across the state to ask every non-profit, every politician, everyone they've ever given a dollar to, to support the merger. 1/5

[John Farrell ☀️🌬🔋 @johnffarrell]

Calvin Butler, Exelon's CEO, only used half his $300K personal jet allowance last year. Like other utility CEOs, he knows what it's like to cut back. https://t.co/1wSZRNxZpN

[John Farrell ☀️🌬🔋 @johnffarrell]

How must it feel to be opening your electric bill to higher rates and hear that this president's administration is cashing in on insider information all day long?

[60 Minutes @60Minutes]

“We spotted nine Polymarket accounts, all connected, who made, collectively,$2.4 million betting almost exclusively on U.S. military operations,” says Nicolas Vaiman, co-founder of the small data analytics firm Bubblemaps.

“And now here's the crazy part: 98% win rate.” https://t.co/T79aYM48ZI

[John Farrell ☀️🌬🔋 @johnffarrell]

These are two sides to the same story. h/t to EPI for the research

[John Farrell ☀️🌬🔋 @johnffarrell]

Afraid of competition and wildly unpopular due to excessive profits and rising rates, for-profit utilities resort to funding pretend grassroots groups in Maine, Florida, Michigan (+ more) to fend off public takeovers: https://t.co/y9878Y0fns

[John Farrell ☀️🌬🔋 @johnffarrell]

As we watch Spirit Airlines fail due to anti-competitive tactics from the big four airlines, this is a well-timed suggestion.

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

It's time to nationalize the airlines.

Air travel is a public good, and taking the profit out of the system would mean cheaper flights and cheaper shipping.

Nationalization would also mean the public air service would be bound to serve the whole country, like the post office.

Right now taxpayers are already subsidizing the airlines via billions of dollars of bailouts and subsidies. We deserve a say in how they are run.

Let's make airlines work for us instead of padding the pockets of billionaires.