The fossil fuel industry has continued to fight the development of clean energy, which is why we are so pleased to report that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has essentially ruled against an Arizona utility company that penalized people for using solar rooftop panels.

At issue here is the fact that most forms of energy generation kill huge numbers of animals. Nuclear power kills fish when they are sucked into the cooling towers and boiled to death. Hydroelectric dams kill fish by blocking migration pathways and shredding fish in their turbines. And fossil fuels kill fish through carbon emissions, oil spills, and by using enormous amounts of water for steam conversion to drive turbine-generators. (For comparison, a 2012 study found that one megawatt-hour of electricity produced by coal consumes 60,000 gallons of water, whereas the same amount of energy produced by wind or solar consumes zero gallons of water.) 

It doesn’t help that fossil-fuel burning plants, hydroelectric dams, and nuclear reactors are where U.S. electricity suppliers have historically made most of their investments, and so are accordingly where they bring in most of their profits. For this reason, electricity providers regularly demonstrate an outright hostility toward newer, and less harmful, forms of energy generation. 

This brings us to the Ellis v. Salt River Project case. The background of the case is fairly complex, but in summary, the electricity provider had dramatically increased the rates it charged customers by 60% for using rooftop solar panels, precisely with the goal of driving down the demand for rooftop solar energy systems. What the court in this case ruled was that the electricity provider was using a coercive measure to prevent its customers from choosing freely among market alternatives in violation of antitrust laws.

It is hard to overstate the importance of this ruling. Big Energy does not like rooftop solar as it is a threat to its business model. Rooftop solar, however, is quite possibly the most animal-friendly form of all energy generation. It is even safer than wind and solar farms, which — while vastly safer than fossil fuel, nuclear, and hydroelectric — still kill significant numbers of animals. Now, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that big energy does not have the right to wage war on clean, climate and animal-friendly rooftop solar simply because it threatens Big Energy's bottom line.

This is a ruling that everyone who cares about animals can celebrate. 

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Learn more about how energy generation affects animals here.