Saving Our Farms and Keeping Our Money from Salud Carbajal

by Andy Caldwell

Aug 31, 2025

Congressman Salud Carbajal claimed during a press conference that President Trump, by ending subsidies, tax credits, and incentives, for so-called clean energy projects, will increase American’s energy bills, kill energy and manufacturing jobs, and weaken grid reliability.

The opposite is true.

First of all, so-called renewable energy such as offshore and onshore wind, along with solar farms, are the reason Californians have the second highest electricity costs in the country only after Hawaii (more on that later). Moreover, we already produce so much excess solar that we must pay other states to take it off our hands because it destabilizes the grid. Then, there is the fact that the jobs lost by Trump’s bill that was signed into law won’t affect American manufacturing as much as China because almost all the raw materials going into solar panels and electric vehicle batteries come from China.

Bye-Bye Avila Beach; Hello Long Beach

Finally, the one project Carbajal was rooting for – the ginormous offshore wind farm off Morro Bay – would have required turning Avila Beach and Port San Luis into a Long Beach-like industrial port.

Also involved in this push for renewables is our Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors. Its staff is launching environmental review to allow industrial-scale solar and battery energy storage systems (BESS) to be built pretty much anywhere including by way of ag-land conversions.

Forever and a day, the county and the state have been keen on protecting ag lands from development of any kind. But, just as whales and eagles have been sacrificed to the green windmill gods, so has agriculture.

But as is usual, nobody in county government knows a thing about building industrial-scale solar and BESS. A note of explanation here is necessary. Because we already have too much solar being generated in the middle of the day, when we don’t need it so much as in the evening hours, to prevent all sorts of problems the renewable energy zealots want to spend millions storing the four hours of solar-powered electricity until the evening hours. That is why they are pushing the BESS along with the solar.

However, this is what these career politicians and government bureaucrats fail to realize. You can’t plop these facilities just anywhere. They need to be near a utility substation. Moreover, the solar/BESS combo will need its own substation to interface with the utility substation. For the fools thinking they can plop these facilities on a farm field in the middle of nowhere, the cost per mile to build overhead transmission lines can range from $1 million to $11 million depending on voltage and other factors. Burying them underground costs 10-15 times more than overhead lines. Without subsidies, mandates, and tax credits, the only people that would waste this type of money would be our government, to wit, California high-speed rail.

Worse News for Carbajal and Friends

In addition to the Big Beautiful Bill cutting subsidies and tax credits for wind and solar, the Trump administration is also ending programs that convert farms that grow food to solar farms.

As reported by Zerohedge.com “Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced Monday that the Department of Agriculture will no longer use taxpayer dollars to fund large-scale solar or wind projects on productive farmland, nor allow solar panels made by foreign adversaries in USDA programs.”

The department cited farmland loss as a driving concern. Tennessee has lost more than 1.2 million acres in the past 30 years and could lose 2 million by 2027. Nationally, solar installations on farmland have risen nearly 50% since 2012.

“Our prime farmland should not be wasted and replaced with green-new-deal-subsidized solar panels,” Rollins said. “One of the largest barriers of entry for new and young farmers is access to land. Subsidized solar farms have made it more difficult for farmers to access farmland by making it more expensive and less available.”

On X, she added: “This destruction of our farms and prime soil is taking away the futures of the next generation of farmers and the future of our country. Starting today, [USDA] will no longer deploy programs to fund solar or wind projects on productive farmland, ending massive taxpayer handouts. We are also ending the use of panels made by foreign adversaries like China.”

Finally, regarding Carbajal’s statement that without more green energy, utility prices are going to skyrocket: Ha! They already have! And that is because we have been forcing our utilities to go green for the past 20 plus years.

According to the CA Public Utilities Commission: In a little more than a year, the number of California customers who can’t pay their utility bills increased by about 1 million and the collective amount owed doubled.

Saving Farmlands for Farmers

At the end of November 2023, more than 2.4 million investor-owned utilities (ironically IOU) customers were in arrears by more than $1.1 billion (California Energy Markets No. 1776). By the end of March 2025, the number of customers in arrears had increased to about 3.4 million and their collective debt grew to almost $2.2 billion, according to the most recent reports filed by IOUs to the California Public Utilities Commission.

Thank you, President Trump, for ending this cycle of paying more to build and use so-called green energy by way of tax incentives, grants, and subsidized utility payments. And thank you too for saving our farmland.

Andy Caldwell, Executive Director, COLAB