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SD public defense duties shift from counties to state; SCOTUS appears skeptical of restricting government communications with social media companies; Trump lawyers say he can't make bond; new scholarships aim to connect class of 2024 to high-demand jobs.

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The SCOTUS weighs government influence on social media, and who groups like the NRA can do business with. Biden signs an executive order to advance women's health research and the White House tells Israel it's responsible for the Gaza humanitarian crisis.

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Midwest regenerative farmers are rethinking chicken production, Medicare Advantage is squeezing the finances of rural hospitals and California's extreme swing from floods to drought has some thinking it's time to turn rural farm parcels into floodplains.

Washington Looks to Communities in Renewable-Energy Push

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Wednesday, December 28, 2016   

OLYMPIA, Wash. – Washington state's step toward a clean-energy future in the new year will involve more communities generating their own renewable energy. The Evergreen State is one of four chosen by the National Governors Association to swap policy advice on how to modernize its electric-power sector.

Tony Usibelli, special assistant to the director at the Energy and Climate Policy Division of the Washington State Department of Commerce, said the state has already taken a special interest in something lacking in the Northwest.

"Policies around small, distributed generation," he said. "Things like net metering, where you can sell your electricity back to utilities; things like the deployment of more community solar systems."

The National Governors Association also chose Oregon, Kentucky and Rhode Island to participate in what it calls a "policy academy." Washington plans to focus on reforming market incentives for solar as well. According to the Solar Energy Industries Association, the state's solar-energy capacity in 2015 grew by 85 percent over the previous year.

Usibelli noted that Washington already produces and relies on more renewable energy than any other state in the country. Hydropower provides more than half of the state's electricity, but he said the goal is to fill the rest of its needs through other renewable power sources.

"So, our interest is in finding ways that we can help fill in and help develop, particularly through this academy, some of what are becoming much more economically attractive, distributed resources to generate renewables," he explained.

Not everyone sees hydroelectric dams as truly "renewable" power, because of their effects on fish populations and the natural flow of rivers. But the state has ambitious carbon-reduction goals. It plans to reduce carbon emissions to 50-percent below 1990 levels by 2050.


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