Hawaii gives us a glimpse of the future of what solar will look like in the US. They are the hottest solar market in the US due to having the highest electricity rates combined with excellent conditions for solar. The primary utility in Hawaii (HECO), has started denying many permits to homeowners due to grid saturation on many circuits.
Infrastructure investments must now be done by HECO to allow for increased solar adoption - something that may not be in the best interest for the utility.
Based on their cost of $0.02 cents per listener hour, I wanted to calculate how many hours per day my $36 yearly payment equates to (ignoring their operational costs):
Well, the democratic options are limited. Aside from calling your representatives in congress and encouraging everyone you know to do the same.
The electorate is uninformed and easily manipulated. Bias in the news media is generally to support the status quo and not rock the boat. Lively debate occurs mostly for easily understood and emotional issues. Covering complex issues with complex answers is not a winning strategy for aggressive ad revenue goals.
With an uninformed and easily manipulated electorate, elections are largely influenced by money. Corporations and wealthy people contribute the most money to election campaigns, and therefore have a significant amount of influence over policy decisions and positions. Gerrymandering is also a huge problem and further reduces the amount of debate and competition during elections.
Lawrence Lessig (through rootstrikers.org) is a pioneer in raising awareness on how damaging the above situation is to a healthy functioning democracy. Awareness is the best thing we can do to improve the situation. If you're interested, check out this TED Talk that Lessig did: http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_t...
I haven't been exposed to Huffington Post much, aside from seeing some hyperbolic sensational posts back during the Bush Administration days which just made me doubt their commitment to any type of journalistic integrity. I've kind of avoided them since.