One step away from the Stone Age

Those for profit companies do things far more cost affective and efficient then any public utility can.
But if not, campaign to have your state government take over the electric system! Good luck with that! Your government will be so efficient of running the system it will cost you double what it does now. So lets lay off the "for profit" stuff *LOL*

Study Long Island NY when the state took over their system. *L*


CT deregulated the utilities a decade or more a go, IIRC, and since then prices have seemingly increasing at a historic rate. To complicate matters, the state has pushed green initiatives that have certainly increased rates. I'm all for cleaner air and environment, but for the near term the cost is often downplayed.
 
CT deregulated the utilities a decade or more a go, IIRC, and since then prices have seemingly increasing at a historic rate. To complicate matters, the state has pushed green initiatives that have certainly increased rates. I'm all for cleaner air and environment, but for the near term the cost is often downplayed.
An infalible sign they’re not deregulated.

1+1=2 ... Wanna bet?
 

Around me, UI owns a LOT of the lines and even though you can "shop" around... by the time you pay UI transmission costs, you don't really save anything with generation costs. Also, often those other supplier prices fluctuation more than UIs does.

Maybe unfair to pin it on deregulation solely... but our prices for electricity and gas are near highest in the nation (0.25/kwh and $1.5/CCF).
 
God help us. I have a wood burning insert and burn4-6 full cords a year with it, and have done so for the 22+ years I lived in this house. This is the first I'm hearing of that, but then again I haven't stumbled upon it, or inquired about it.
We will have to get lobbyists to be allowed to burn wood in a fireplace/stove of any design.

We will have protocols on how to buy, store, burn, and clean the fireplace or wood stove. Your city will have to inspect the fireplace/stove yearly at a $200 inspection fee. We will have a fireplace/stove tax of $3,000, purchased at your city clerk, before being allowed to purchase the fireplace/stove. Only register dealers can sell fireplaces/stoves. Your house will need a pre-inspection site visit and we will need an engineered drawing of your planned install. Only certified fireplace and stove installer will be allowed to install your stove, and ONLY before you have the pre-inspection and engineered drawing by a licensed engineer, of the fireplace and stove placement. No DIY installs will be allowed. If a any form of a wood burning unit is found without all the certifications, the owner of the building will be fined $40,000 with a minimum of 3 years in jail and up to 6 years in jail for each unit found, not to be certified and installed with certified installers that validated all inspections and certified installing events in specific order deemed by federal and state law.

We will have technology to see how long, how intense, and how often you burn wood. You will have to have residential wood burning environmental insurance costing between $2,000 to $6,000 a year depending on your burn rate. There will be a federal and state burn stamp needed to be posted on all sides of your house on the first level that has a size exceeding 100 sq ft. Each stamp sticker will cost $32 each, so I hope you only have house with only 4 sides on a slab. If you have a walk out basement, the stamps have to be present on the lower and upper level. Wood burning fireplaces or stoves will be 100% banned in stand alone structures, when their is a main living structure present on the property. If you have trees twice the height of the highest point of your living stucture on your property within 100ft of the structure that contains the fireplace/stove you will be mandated to carry federal hazardous tree endangerment insurance costing $8,000 a year.

As of 2021, you must have a certified fireplace/stove exhaust scrubber/anti-spark and ember containment system. $8,000. This will have to be certified every other year by your local fire dept with a test burn by a verified fireman of your municipality. This test is not to exceed a $300 fee by law. Before selling your house you will have to have pre-sale certification test with camera inspection of all exhaust tubing and if that tubing is more then 6 years old the seller will have to install new exhaust tubing for the new buyer. All welds on the fireplace of stove will need inspection at this time of sale. Both forms of radiographic and ultrasonic weld inspection will be mandated for this non-destructive testing. Only federal and state approved company's will be allowed to do these tests.

At any point, anyone within a 1 mile radius can demand an air test at 8 specific points in this radius defined by the EPA after doing a geographic and a site specific wind plotting survey, the survey's cost will be the responsibility of the fireplace owner or stove owner, not to exceed $20,000 by law.
 
Years ago we had power out for over a week . Luckily we had a generator . Not for whole house . Only for A/C , frig , microwave , TV , cables box ,and lighting . Had to alternate between appliances that used more watts . No well pump , so had to buy bottled water . Feel for all those people . Including animals , domestic and wildlife . Thankfully , the outage was in mid / late spring and not mid winter .
 
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Lots of lessons to be learned there sadly. For starters IMO wind turbines and solar panels need some tweaking. Especially if the plan is to go all EV.
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They work perfectly fine up here in the Northeast. Then again, we know how to build stuff to handle actual winter :)

All those busted pipes in TX homes....it would not have taken much at all to build the houses to a spec where the pipes would have not been exposed to unconditioned air. And that would prevent them from freezing and splitting.
 
They work perfectly fine up here in the Northeast. Then again, we know how to build stuff to handle actual winter :)

All those busted pipes in TX homes....it would not have taken much at all to build the houses to a spec where the pipes would have not been exposed to unconditioned air. And that would prevent them from freezing and splitting.

Let's be sure to qualify "work perfectly fine" to mean that they typically don't freeze up (heated blades, nacelle and housings). They can still be shutdown due to impending over-speed and don't produce when it isn't windy, which happens frequently during the summer months and cold snaps.

This is one of my go-to shots from the summer of 2019 (I track wind turbine output across Ontario):
Screen Shot 2021-01-10 at 10.55.42 AM.png


No amount of winter preparedness mitigates a lack of wind, and winter capacity, during a cold spell, can be similarly impacted as it is during a hot spell in the summer. During the most recent one, wind output in Ontario was below 200MW (of 5,000) for several days.

Now, I will add that overall wind performance is better in Texas than it is in Ontario, but we are still talking of a total output profile of ~1,000MW of 28,000MW at its lowest during the events of the 15th even if they had been fitted with the cold weather package.
 
They work perfectly fine up here in the Northeast. Then again, we know how to build stuff to handle actual winter :)

All those busted pipes in TX homes....it would not have taken much at all to build the houses to a spec where the pipes would have not been exposed to unconditioned air. And that would prevent them from freezing and splitting.
I'm in the Northeast as well. The houses handle the cold OK. Quick update, the neighbor across the street solar panels are now snow free and operational. We have a nice bright sunny day today.

Quick story. Sandy taught a small community I work in from time to time a lesson about putting electrical power lines underground. Sandy flooded them, and destroyed the electric in a small area of attached homes. I'm thinking 300 families were w/o power for weeks more than the areas with power strung from poles. They had to dig up all of the underground power lines in this area and replace them, along with transformers that failed. It appears the people designing the electric getting into homes in this area never thought they'd be under 3' or more of water. They were worried about wind. ;)

IMO solar and wind are still not ready for prime time, there are still bugs to be ironed out, even more so in the Northeast.
 
I find it interesting that when I watched the very first interview with the Texas LG … what he said almost mirrored what O/K has eloquently posted … in fact he said they hoped to get 12% from wind and acknowledged that all systems had multiple issues …
Even some nuclear went off for a while …
Most of us know good and well why CNN is coming to the rescue without knowing jack

Why are you watching CNN?:unsure:

How hard is it to stick with known moderate (both sides) news sources. Well, what would you guys have to call “fake news” then besides the obvious?
 
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During the great northeast blackout of 2003, it was apparent folks didn't know what to do. I pulled the rope on the garage door opener and got my car back into the garage when they sent us home from work. When the water pressure started going down I filled the bathtub just in case. Lit my gas stove with a lighter and cooked my dinner on the stove. Had the battery powered lantern and oil lamps going, and read a book since I couldn't watch TV. Rather peaceful, actually. Finally around 9:00 that night the power was restored. Next day, my colleagues were bemoaning how they couldn't get their car out of the garage and were pretty much helpless, and that was with the power out for about 5 hours. They looked at me like I was MacGuyver when I revealed how I handled it. I didn't even have a generator back then.
 
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