Power to the People; Electrical Power That Is.
Good Morning
After reading all the posts and some e-mails generated by yesterday’s article about T. Boone Pickens wind farm, I thought I should answer some questions that might be of benefit to everyone.
I sat on the board of a large power generation and transmission company for about five years until I could no longer stand the corruption. To my knowledge, I’m the only person who ever resigned one of those coveted seats on pure principal. However, my committee for those years covered
Power companies have a keen interest in the progress of
The old stories about the power company buying up all the good ideas and shelving them is pure hogwash.
I’m getting a little ahead of myself here. I have a lot of personal knowledge and experience with power and the technology of both wind and solar. I helped build a hybrid wind, solar, storage battery and generator system for a friend in a remote area of
That being said, it was necessity that drove my friend to spend that kind of money. The batteries were hauled in one at a time by snowmobile and sled, each weighing 365 pounds. Had there been a power line within sight, this venture would never have paid off.
Back to my story of
The average cost per kilowatt hour of deluxe installed solar is about 30 cents unless you do all of the work yourself. Depending on where you are in the
My point is that the best time to switch for the average person has not come yet. Just like VCRs and digital cameras, the price will come down and the technology will go up. As we run out of fuel and the cost of conventional power climbs,
It is possible to sell individual excess generated power back to the power company in most states. It’s called net metering. The power company in most states has to pay you retail price for that power. Yet, the cost of power generation or purchased wholesale power is only around 65% of running a power company. So how can the power company pay back 35% more for a product than they could buy it from the wholesaler? It’s called a tax in any other words.
You can see that if enough people were to net meter, it would break the power company or the rates would have to be increased to the remainder of the customers to make up for the losses. I decided to contact my friend who is the manager of our local power company to see just what impact net metering was having on their business.
His answer was that out of some 50,000 customers, they have about 20 people selling minimum power back. But he also told me that over the past six years, power has increased by 50% and he sees no end to that t
The bottom line in my opinion is this, once installed
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bb (me)- Here is what our fairly slow president had to offer along the lines of energy today; and I think his first statement is accurate. My question is, why did he wait so long? :
Pres. - “We’ve got to do more at home,” the president said on the lush lawn of a resort overlooking the Red Sea in Sharm El-Sheik, Egypt.
bb (me)- Now this next statement old Badlands Bush comes up with may appear to be leading toward the aternative energy thing on the surface:
Pres. - He asked Abdullah for an injection of oil supply to help ease the pain. “High energy prices are going to cause countries like mine to accelerate our move to alternative energy,” he said he told the king.
bb (me)- But as you can see below, the preceeding paragraph was just more rhetoric. He also brought our equally dim-witted congress into this, their real train of thought:
Pres. - Bush’s domestic energy plan includes opening a coastal strip of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil exploration and production and making it easier to build new oil refineries and nuclear power plants in the United States. Even if Congress decided to approve them, the moves would not offer short-term relief to families.
bb (me)- For some reason “Peak Oil” to our elected officials means, peak oil only for the oil we have discovered to date. They obviously believe peak oil will grow some how in the future? Maybe they have not researched the 1956 theory or the 1970 documentation of that theory that shows that Hubbert’s calculations include earth’s oil reserves, period. All that we have. And all that we are ever going to have. Maybe our elected officials really are as ignorant or stupid as we believe them to be? I don’t have that answer, but some of the evidence sure leads that direction.
Guess my next question is, how many of our nation’s citizens, knowing how much help our un-informed representatives require, have written or called their representatives to request (demand) we change direction? That’s what I thought. -bb
This is for BB.. Why do you think that writing our representatives would change things, or do any good ?? I don’t.. The problem is a corrupt political system.. wma…
Of course, you are correct WmA. Contacting our representatives will do absolutley no good, unless done by a large number of people. This has been proven many times in the past. But it does work when the masses unite.
Problem is that most folks want to be informed by the media, who just report what our representatives feed them for the most part. We are a lazy and un-informed lot.
Another problem is that people do not want to know the truth. It is too uncomfrtable for them, so when they hear the they say the candidate is uninformed and out of touch. Of course, many times the people do not even know they are hearing the truth, because few are informed enough to make that determination. What other conclusion could be reached when you look at just two of the players; Dr. Paul a truth teller (documented) and Hillary Clinton a chronic liar (documented). These are not the only one’s; just an example.
When large sectors of our population are informed as they have been in past era’s, there is little doubt that our elected officials are also informed. Our representatives have never and will never remain an informed party to the needs of our nation without informed input from it’s citizens.
We have become naive, lazy and gullible. Alternative energy was pushed to the back burner, so oil could rein as king, not because our representatinve were not aware of peak oil and what it would mean in the future (now), but because they did not hear the constant squeek of their many constituents, asking them to do what’s right; and then demanding it. And the monetary gain to our representaives from the oil companies was too great to allow their conscience to interupt the free ride for themselves. Because of our nation’s mentatility today, this will be repeated many more times until it is broken. Then it will change. All because we choose to be uninformed and we choose to be nonparticipants in our system. And much of this, in part, is stimulated by the fact that we today as a nation prefer to believe lies, when many times the truth would sound much better. -bb