This week, Sal Nuzzo, a VP at an extreme pro-free-market think tank, told an audience that Amendment 1, backed by utility-funded "Consumers for Smart Solar," was a deliberate effort to get FL residents to vote against expansion of solar power while thinking they're voting for it.
In response to what we wrote about the revelation, a spokesperson for the campaign was quick to deny that the James Madison Institute — the think tank in question — had anything to do with the campaign.
On Friday, the Miami Herald reported that Consumers for Smart Solar had deleted multiple posts — seven from Twitter and eight from Facebook — that had touted JMI "research" in support of its cause.
Last December, JMI released a study suggesting that a competing amendment that was pro solar but never made it onto the ballot, Consumers for Smart Solar, would have cost Florida consumers over $1 billion.
The institute also backs Amendment 1 in its voters' guide, but Smart Solar apparently deleted that post (a spokeswoman for the campaign told the Herald that consultants who run the campaign's social media deleted the posts without permission).
Solar energy advocates believe the campaign was trying to hide its ties to the institute, whose vice president, Nuzzo, called the amendment "savvy" and "political jiu-jitsu" that “would completely negate anything they [pro-solar interests] would try to do either legislatively or constitutionally down the road.”
David Pomerantz, executive director of the pro-solar Energy and Policy Institute, said that "the utility-funded group behind Amendment 1 seems to be allergic to telling the truth. The utilities can try to delete this scandal right out of existence, but there’s no amount of ‘jiu-jitsu’ that can hide the fact that Amendment 1 is an attack on solar power, pure and simple."
The Herald notes that Nuzzo, who made those comments in Nashville earlier this month, also removed posts pertaining to the amendment from his personal Facebook page.