By CECIL BOTHWELL

The dream of getting something for nothing has an unending allure, probably because most of us have worked pretty hard to get anything at all.

One of the things most of us gain along the way is the knowledge that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. But that doesn’t diminish the feeling that a free lunch would be nice, or dim our occasional susceptibility to snake oil peddlers who offer us the next newest version of perpetual motion. 

These days the Internet is full of misinformation about engines that run on water or some sort of unlimited energy that exists all around us, yet kept unavailable by corporations or governments or the Bilderbergs or somebody!

Those wild tales are pretty easy to see through if you paid any attention at all during elementary school science lessons. But sometimes the free lunch pitch is less obvious. 

For example, during this year’s Asheville City Council election campaign one candidate used the retail price of a gallon of water at a local supermarket to suggest either that the city was giving away a precious resource to commercial businesses at far too low a price, or that the city could get into the water business and make millions of dollars currently “lying on the table.”

Wow! I mean, look at the numbers! A gallon of water at Ingles costs $1.50 and a big commercial user is only billed about 1/3 of a cent per gallon. Somebody is getting rich and it ought to be the city!

What this sales pitch ignores is that the retail price of a one gallon jug reflects the cost of bottling and delivery and a hefty profit for the store. The cost of the water itself amounts to something like a rounding error. Asheville’s largest water bottling plant, Milko (owned by Ingles), only pays for delivery of water to their facility, at the same rate we charge other commercial users.

After all, water is sometimes scarce, but it’s always free, carried up to the sky by solar heating and delivered via rain. Capturing, storage, treatment and delivery are what you see reflected on your water bill. 

Of course, all energy is really solar energy. If, like me, you’ve baled hay and split firewood, you know that using the free solar power stored in growing plants involves hard work.

Most of our energy comes from ancient sunlight in the form of coal, oil, and gas, and some from all that free water going through turbines in hydroelectric dams. Delivering that power where we want it and when we want it is expensive. (Nuclear power is derived from even older sunlight, from uranium formed in ancient stars, long before our own solar system was born.)

It’s worth noting that all of that energy starts out as free, delivered to our planet from the sun, captured by plants which were later compressed to become coal and oil, delivered to mountaintops through evaporation and rain, or condensed from the remnants of stars that exploded eons ago. 

The companies which deliver our energy tap into that free resource through investment in land, licensing and technologies.

The biggest financial outflow from our local economy is for delivery of energy from outside our region. If we want to grow our local economy, slowing that outflow is a great place to start.

New technologies developed since World War II now allow us to capture sunlight directly, through solar electric panels.

Those panels have become much cheaper and more efficient in recent years, so today it is an affordable option for any home- or business-owner who has sunlight shining on a roof.

That’s why businesses like A-B Emblem in Weaverville, the Biltmore Company, New Belgium Brewery and Sierra Nevada have made solar power part of their business plans.

That’s why I’ve installed solar panels on my roof, and have started the Asheville Metro Area Zero Energy District plan to move our community toward greater energy independence.

The City of Asheville reduces operational energy use by 4 percent every year, saving taxpayers thousands of dollars in energy bills. You can do the same, and I’ll be here to help. 

•

Cecil Bothwell, author of nine books, including “She Walks On Water: A novel” (Brave Ulysses Books, 2013), is a member of Asheville City Council.