Forget About the Candidates' Houses. How About the Houses of Congress?

I don’t know how many fireplaces Barack and Michelle Obama have in their home. I don’t know how many homes John and Cindy McCain own. Nor do I give a damn.

I do know that there are two houses that each American owns in addition to the ones he or she lives in. One is called the House of Representatives. The other is called the Senate. Those houses matter. Hold that thought.

Rather than counting fireplaces or real estate, let’s count megawatts. Eight hundred to be exact.

That’s how many megawatts of generating capacity will be added to California’s power grid from two mega solar projects planned for San Luis Obispo County. A week or so ago, Pacific Gas & Electric, one of California’s big utilities, signed contracts with two solar photovoltaic developers to build a 550-megawatt “solar farm” and a 250-megawatt “solar ranch.”

These won’t be penny-ante demonstration plants that produce more photo ops than power. Eight hundred megawatts is big. In capacity, 800 megawatts is about equal to a garden-variety coal plant and almost as big as your typical nuke. Together, the solar plants will produce enough carbon-free electricity to power an estimated 239,000 homes.

If they’re built, that is. Because if Congress doesn’t extend the solar investment tax credit, which expires Dec. 31, they may not get built. The big solar plans may get cashiered, along with plans for many more wind plants, the fastest growing energy resource in America.

And that would be the fault of those two houses of Congress that all of us own. Extending renewable energy tax credits is getting lost in the partisan clown show that is passing for an energy policy debate in DC.

Members of both parties claim to support the extensions, but they’re being held hostage to other agendas. Republicans want to see more oil drilling rigs and Democrats want to stick it to Big Oil.

The screamers on both sides of the aisle are giving higher priority to pandering and posturing than about building up a clean energy sector that could be the greatest technology boom that America has ever seen. Wind in the Great Plains. New-generation biofuels in the South. Geothermal in the West. Wave and tidal energy off the coasts. Solar everywhere the sun shines.

Including San Luis Obispo County, a treasure of a place on California’s largely unspoiled central coast. Up Highway 1, 30 or so miles north of the county seat, is a tiny burg called Harmony. If Harmony has any harmony to spare, the townspeople ought to pack it up and send it by overnight mail to our tenants in DC.

And tenants are what they are. Never mind the media gaffe-mongers and their trivial obsessions about McCain’s and Obama’s houses. Pay attention to the houses of Congress. Make the tenants shape up and pass those renewable energy tax credit extensions. Now.