Gore Vidal vs. the electric grid

Author Gore Vidal is hard to classify. He’s a supporter of the old Republic, meaning non-interventionism in foreign affairs and at least some controls on government. Yet he’s a big fan of FDR, who did more than anyone to turn the old, limited-government American Republic into an empire without limit.

Now he’s in an amusing battle to put on line solar panels in his home in Hollywood Hills. The city-run Los Angles Department of Water and Power shut down the solar panels because they’re not part of the electricity grid.

Which would seem to be the point of the panels, wouldn’t it? To get off the grid? Not to bureaucrats. Currently, TruthDig reports,

Vidal is still “on the grid,” unable to use solar until the system is fully re-inspected….Simply put, he tells Truthdig’s Associate Editor Kasia Anderson, “[utility companies] have no intention for anyone to use solar power so long as there’s a drop of oil anywhere in the world.”

Actually, the LADWP isn’t a private utility company, but calls itself “the nation’s largest municipal utility,” meaning it’s run by the government. And in California, the vast majority of electricity comes from nuclear power and natural gas, not oil. The LADWP even offers rebates to those with solar panels, so Vidal might get some money back.

But never mind. Vidal is feisty in his opposition to the bureaucrats. Why shouldn’t he be able to install and operate solar panels on his home? He says that he installed the solar panels because, a year ago, “for eight days we are without any power of any kind in the house, and some genius somewhere in the municipal divisions had managed to turn my telephone off.” He’s old and needs an elevator to get around his house, yet the elevator won’t work without power.

Maybe Vidal, whose family came from Tennessee (he’s related to Al Gore), will write a novel about how FDR’s Tennessee Valley Authority was a fascist imposition on a once-free country and should be privatized. (That’s FDR signing the TVA bill in 1933 in the picture.) The sequel could be on the privatization of the LADWP.