In some US states the coal companies and other big energy giants are pressuring politicians to overturn renewable energy targets and ban or tax the feed-in tariffs that make it possible for rooftop solar owners to sell their excess power, bringing down the cost of green energy.

In other states, like Florida, the power companies are fighting to keep laws in place to protect their existing monopolies.

Similar battles are being played out in Australia. The difference is that in the US the unlikely coalition of conservative grassroots movements and environmental activists is fighting back against big business and government, and in some states the grassroots movement is winning.

The forces fighting against the spread of cheap green power – mainly rooftop solar – are significant.

The driving force are the Koch brothers, Charles and David, the two billionaire industrialists who own the second-largest private company in America, anchored in fossil fuels.

In support of the Koch brothers is a loose confederation of conservative politicians, think tanks and industry bodies, many of them funded wholly or in part by the Koch brothers.

The Koch brothers' political machine, Freedom Partners, has announced it will raise and spend $US889 million ($1.15 billion) pushing conservative causes in the 2016 presidential election.

That might seem a lot to the average billionaire seeking to sway an election, but given Koch Industries took $US113 billion in revenues in 2013, they can afford it. They are also raising money from allies.

An emerging champion against the Koch brothers is Debbie Dooley, a 56-year-old founding member of the Tea Party movement who describes herself as a "gammy" to six-year-old Ayden, then as a political activist.

"I'm a preacher's daughter from Louisiana," Dooley says in a languid drawl redolent of all the southern states in which her father preached when she was a girl – Alabama, Mississippi and Florida.

Dooley has always been political, she says. But after the economic collapse and the Wall Street bail out she abandoned the Republican Party and was one of the first 22 people to host a Tea Party rally.

Dooley says her fight for renewable energy sits neatly in her conservative Tea Party philosophy.

She is opposed to government interference and big business monopolies. She believes in the right of people to generate and sell their own power, which the utility companies are trying to prevent by charging solar owners increasing fees to use the grid.

She instinctively believes in a decentralised power grid, which she says would be less vulnerable to terrorist attack.

Asked if she believes in climate change and she won't even address the question.

"Once you start talking about climate change, conservatives stop listening," she says, like the astute political campaigner she has become.

Much of her experience in campaigning has been gained through her ties with the Tea Party, and she remains a national co-ordinator of one of its umbrella groups, the Tea Party Patriots.

In 2012 she formed a group called the Green Tea Coalition and began campaigning to have Georgia's all-Republican energy commission change regulations to make the monopoly power company buy more excess rooftop power.

The Koch group Americans for Prosperity hit back hard, with a direct mail and email campaign saying solar power would disrupt the network and force up energy prices by 40 per cent.

"They just lied about it," Dooley said.

In the end Dooley, in an unlikely alliance with environmental activist groups including the Sierra Club, won the fight.

The Green Tea Coalition is now taking up the fight in Florida, where the group is fighting to pass a constitutional amendment to prevent the state government from passing legislation that benefits the regional power monopolies.

In Florida, as in Georgia, the links between the fossil fuel industry and both major parties run deep.

It was revealed earlier this year that the Republican governor, Rick Scott, has banned even the use of the term "climate change" in official documents or on correspondence among the state's own scientists and researchers.

Recently a former Republican energy secretary Paige Kreegel told of being ostracised in his own government when he proposed scrapping laws that restricted the spread of solar panels on Floridian homes and business.

He had thought an ostensibly pro-business government would want to step out of the way of an industry on the rise.

"I didn't know I was on the outside until I went against the public utilities, and then – holy hell," he told the Florida Centre for Investigative Reporting.

According to the Centre's report Florida's four large utilities have donated $12 million to state politicians since 2010, including $1.1 million to groups that backed Scott's 2014 re-election campaign.

In November the Florida state government voted to end its solar rebate program and slashed energy efficiency goals. (The Abbott government has similarly slashed the Renewable Energy Target).  It has also set the rate at which utilities must pay for excess rooftop power at about 2-3¢ per kilowatt-hour, when it stands at 12¢ in other comparable states.

"It's wrong that a state that calls itself the Sunshine State has laws blocking the sun," Dooley says.

Her group is on track to gather the 700,000 signatures she needs to get the proposed change on the 2016 ballot paper.

Political contests like this are being played out across the US, in no small part because one of the key tools used by opponents of renewable energy, the American Legislative Exchange Council, is a conservative machine designed to fight across all states.

ALEC, as it was known, was set up in 1973 to fight progressive initiatives such as the creation of the Environmental Protection Authority

Its model of operation is simple. Corporations and state politicians are invited to join the group for a small fee, while other groups – such as various Koch brothers-affiliated organisations – provide another stream of funding.

After annual meetings ALEC lawyers draft legislation that is in line with the philosophy of the board and the group's members.

Notable ALEC draft legislation has sought to cut taxes, scrap environmental and labour regulations, support "shoot first" gun laws, criminalise animal rights activism and support private prisons.

Once the drafts are completed the bills are distributed to the group's legislative members for introduction into various state legislatures.

This means that business-friendly laws can be effectively introduced and lobbied for at once across many states, and it gives state politicians – even in small poorly funded legislatures – the benefit of introducing legislation under their own name without needing to go to the bother of having write the laws in the first place.

It is not known how many ALEC laws have been passed, but according to an analysis by the Brookings Institution in the 2011-2012 legislative year alone 132 ALEC bills were introduced across the states and 12 enacted.

That gives an ALEC bill a survival rate five times higher than the average bill that makes it to Congress.

In October ALEC distributed and began lobbying for what it rather brazenly called the Electricity Freedom Act, designed to make solar power more expensive.

Its summary reads, "The Electricity Freedom Act repeals the State of {insert state}'s requirement that electric distribution utilities and electric services companies provide _____ per cent of their electricity supplies from renewable energy sources by ____."

But ALEC's move on renewable energy has proved expensive for the organisation, as it prompted some high-profile corporate defections.

One of those companies to pull out in disgust was Google, whose executive chairman Eric Schmidt told NPR, "Everyone understands climate change is occurring and the people who oppose it are really hurting our children and our grandchildren.

"And so we should not be aligned with such people – they're just, they're just literally lying."

So far the renewable energy groups have been able to fight the ALEC law and its powerful backers to a draw, with both sides chalking up wins and losses.

The fight has also seen an increase in activism from the right, as The New Yorker noted in a story earlier this year called "Greening the Tea Party". Even the son of the arch-conservative firebrand Barry Goldwater – Barry Goldwater jnr, has set up his own organisation to fight utility monopolies.

Dooley notes how similar the fight in Australia is to that in America. In both nations, she says, utilities and fossil fuel companies are seeking the same legislative changes to increase the cost of solar.

"I've been told they need a Debbie Dooley in Australia."

Sympathetic politicians are fostered and supported, those who oppose are traduced. Funding is channelled to various think tanks and policy groups which then echo one another's message in sympathetic studies and opinion pieces.

The talking points used to support laws to protect the utilities are the same too. Across the states and in Australia home owners with solar have been labelled "freeloaders" by the utilities and their lobbyists for using the grid to sell their own power.

"They are all using the same strategy," Dooley says. "You have to understand that these worldwide conglomerations ... If they find a strategy is working in one country of course they are going to use it in another country."

She is one of the growing number of people who subscribes to the theory that the playbook of the tobacco companies –cast doubt on the science, fight the politics – is being followed.

Which brings us back to the Koch brothers.

Back in 1984 the Koch brothers founded Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), which described its mission as "to fight for less government, lower taxes, and less regulation". Ron Paul was installed as its leader.

One of the industries it notably fought on behalf of was tobacco.

In 2004 CSE split into two more groups, FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, the same groups the Koch brothers used to back the Tea Party.

What the Koch brothers did not count on though was that these activists would one day become far more sincere in their support for the free market than they are, and appalled at the notion of tamed politicians defending monopolies on behalf of vested interests.

The Koch brothers and their allies are now facing a growing coalition of campaigners, some of whom were made politically active and even trained in their activism by the Koch-backed Tea Party.

As Dooley put it, "They caught a tiger by the toe."