This commentary is by Hans Ohanian of Charlotte, a physicist and writer, author of “Einstein’s Mistakes” and several other books on physics.
Ross Conrad’s high-minded commentary [VTDigger, March 1, 2021] about a racist taint in Vermont’s past and future purchases of cheap electric energy from HydroQuebec reveals his deep sympathy for the Canadian Indigenous tribes, on which the vast expansion of hydroelectric installations in Quebec has imposed much pain and suffering.
But it also reveals his lack of understanding of how to deal with this problem, and his lack of knowledge of how similar cases of racism are arising elsewhere on the globe and imply a taint in our purchase of imported solar panels.
Conrad proposes to “pressure the province [Quebec] to compensate the native people for their land,” and he also proposes the installation of more solar panels and wind turbines in Vermont. He fails to see that these two proposals are in conflict.
Vermont is only a minor player among the customers of HydroQuebec, and when we produce more renewable energy of our own, we become an even smaller player, with less leverage to exert pressure. Obviously, our best strategy is to become a bigger player by buying more HydroQuebec energy. And if we purchase more energy from HydroQuebec, we will have complete control over the financial windfall generated by the resulting reduction of our energy costs.
The HydroQuebec energy would cost us 7 cents per kilowatt-hour, which is about 4 cents per kWh below the 11 cents per kWh wholesale rate we are paying now (the residential retail rate on your Green Mountain Power bill is higher, 0.17 per kWh, because it includes the cost of local transmission and distribution, which is irrelevant in the present context).
We could then send this windfall of 4 cents per kWh directly to the Canadian Indigenous tribes, as a surcharge that offers proportionate compensation for our share of the suffering inflicted on them. By refusing to take any profit from our transaction with HydroQuebec and channeling this profit to the tribes, we would absolve ourselves from any taint arising from our association with HydroQuebec, and we would show we care. In contrast to Conrad, we would offer not only words, but also deeds.
Furthermore, Conrad conveniently forgets that whatever injustice Quebec is committing against its Indigenous tribes pales in comparison with the atrocious racist program that the Chinese military-industrial complex inflicts on Tibetans, Uighurs and other non-Chinese minorities, aimed at suppression and eradication of their culture, language and family ties.
The Chinese arbitrarily deport these minorities from their villages, imprison them in concentration camps, “re-educate” and brainwash them to serve with total obedience in conditions of forced labor, and then ship them to factories to perform whatever slave labor is required.
Whenever Vermonters make payments to the Chinese for solar panels, they must remember that the panels are tainted by these harsh racist conditions of fabrication in China. Whether or not the slave laborers directly touch the panels or merely fabricate, say, foodstuffs for the workers on the solar panel assembly line makes no difference — in the fully integrated and fully planned industries of China a taint in any industry is a taint in all.
In the case of the Canadian Indigenous tribes, we can absolve ourselves of taint by payment of a surcharge. But in the case of Tibetan and Uighur slave workers, any surcharge we offer will either be angrily rejected by the Chinese or disappear into the deep pockets of the Chinese military-industrial complex, where it will probably finance even larger, more secretive, concentration camps.
Besides, when we use quixotic solar panels in sun-poor Vermont, we have no margin of cash from which we could skim off a surcharge to give away. Contrary to the claims of the Vermont solar industry, the effective cost of electric energy from solar panels in Vermont is far above the 17 cents per /kW-h residential rate we are now paying. When reckoning the full effective cost of solar electric energy, we need to consider not only the direct cost of the solar panels, but also the indirect “overhead” required to operate a grid powered by these panels.
As the example of Germany shows, this overhead raises the effective cost to more than 30 cents per kWh (for the German combination of solar panels and wind turbines), because whenever the sun doesn’t shine and/or the wind doesn’t blow, the grid managers have to purchase supplementary energy at a high premium (in the case of Germany, supplementary energy from French nuclear reactors and from Polish or Czech very dirty coal-fired power plants).
So how about an immediate full-scale effort to extricate Vermont from the New England grid and incorporate it into the Quebec grid of our friendly northern neighbors? And, voilà, we will have clean electric energy at a rate of 7 cents per kWh.
To start the ball rolling, let’s learn how to pronounce Montpelier correctly, Monpelié, and let’s eat poutine once a month.
