Luckily for former Texas Governor Rick Perry, he's not the first nominee to be Secretary of the Department of Energy to call for the abolishment of that department. That honor goes to former Michigan Senator Spencer Abraham who, while a member of the Senate, actually co-sponsored a bill to abolish the Department of Energy!

Abraham writes about this curious episode is his very readable and useful book Lights Out: The Ten Myths About (and Real Solutions to) America's Energy Crisis, St. Martin's Press, 2010.

Was I dreaming? Things were slow at Public Utilities Fortnightly. I needed to supplement my Editor-in-Chief pay. 

I applied and, for some reason, was hired as the night watchman at the Newseum. That's the popular interactive museum near the U.S. Capitol on the history of the news and press freedom. 

What happened next is hard to explain. That first night, the Newseum came alive. 

The Energy Department reported that residential solar generated 981 thousand megawatt-hours of electricity in September. Let's see what was its share of total electric generation, nationally and in key states.

We add together utility scale and distributed generation from all sectors including the residential, commercial and industrial sectors. Total generation in September was 353,484 thousand megawatt-hours.

So, nationally, residential solar's share of total generation was 0.3 percent.

The Commerce Department has published detailed consumer expenditure data since 1959, as part of the estimation of the Gross Domestic Product. It published last week the numbers for October of this year.

For just the twenty-fifth month, out of six hundred and ninety-four months since 1959, electric bills fell below 1.4 percent of consumer expenditures.

From January 1959 through October 1999, electric bills had never fallen below 1.4 percent. November 1999 was the first time.