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The Edison Electric institute is a trade group for electric utilities. They published this report in January of 2013.

http://www.eei.org/ourissues/f...

That report changed the attitudes of a huge number of electric utility executives. Before this report, I would describe most electric utility executives as indifferent to solar PV. They viewed it as a marginal technology and that it would probably always be a bit-player. After that report, pretty much none of them feel this way. Many executives at electric utilities are terrified of solar and are spending significant amounts of money lobbying against it.

Is it time for broadband over powerlines finally?

The networking is already in your house:

"Providing broadband service to these customers would simply require adding equipment to their wires. The feature of BPL that would make it more attractive than DSL or cable modem is that BPL customers would immediately have in-house networks without having to purchase and install additional wiring in their homes."

Plug in a wireless hub or router and you're ready to roll.

Although all of this brings up the next problem: You're dealing with *another* monopoly. Bah!

In Philly (well, anywhere PECO services), you can buy power from any number of generating companies, buy you still need to pay PECO delivery charges, as it travels over their lines. Which makes sense, else you'd have power lines from a hundred different companies running through your neighborhood, which more or less used to be the case. In the early days, you had dozens of power companies supplying different electrical needs, using different equipment and voltages and whatnot. The same was true for early phone companies, but it was even worse. So regulation and the formation of a natural monopoly made sense in order to ensure efficient and widespread delivery of power.

I've never seen a home that had heat delivered from a remote provider. Generally, you install some sort of local device that converts some material into heat energy. Most popularly this is either oil or natural gas. Gas delivery is probably a natural monopoly in most places, for the same reason electricity is, but oil is delivered by trucks from any one of dozens of such companies in my area. You are free to choose any one, based on price, which keep the competitive. You could, if you so desired, also create your own heating device that runs off the power of human flatulence or insects moving through its chambers, though I doubt you'd generate sufficient amounts of heat for even a small room. Even with a high-fiber diet.

I think my point is that the only efficient way to ensure universal access to certain utilities is to allow one company have a monopoly on, at a minimum, delivery of said utility. However, television (can TV really be called a utility?) shows can be delivered as efficiently over satellite, cable, fiber or probably even wifi or copper pairs with some of the newer breakthroughs in networking. Of course, I'm getting off point, as the regulations aren't exactly about this issue, but fuck it - it's nearly 4am!

We could continue to debate this endlessly, but maybe you could save time and just read the official report?

I'll also mention that 4 of the 5 NYC boroughs (Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx) have their electricity distribution almost entirely below ground. It was a massive investment, but it was long ago.

They way daylight saving reduces energy consumption is that: 1) Less lights are turned on during daylight than during night. 2) Less lights are turned on while people sleep than when awake. Therefore, minimizing the overlap between the two times decreases the overall number of usage of lights and the overall usage of electricty. Don't think it's much? Let's run some numbers.

Average lightbulb in a home: 100 watts. Let's say that at any given time when the lights are on, there are 2 lights turned on in a household. Over 1 hr that is 200 watt-hours or .2kWh There are 281421906 people in the US as of the 2000 census. The average family size was 2.57. That means there are ~109 millions households. 109E6 times .2kWh = nearly 22 gigawatt hours saved/day if everyone's lights are turned off an extra hour per day. Extending Daylight Saving Time to full year would theoretically save almost 4 terawatts per year.

Got some evidence for this? The deregulation battle dragged on for years. Several new power plants have been approved since deregulation was finally settled, and except for one recent approval for a peaker plant near SFO, I'm not aware of a case where they lowered environmental regs. But since they take years to build, I don't think any of them have come on line.

An article from EEI in November claims: "In fact, virtually no new large powerplants have been built in California or New York for nearly two decades--at a time when the economy has surged and new demands have been imposed on the electric grid." Another article from the San Jose Business Journal in 1998 claimes: "In Northern California, the newest utility thermal unit began operating 26 years ago."

I think the key here is large powerplants. I know there are two Northern California powerplants being built to provide about 500 MW each, but I think the definition of "large" EEI is talking about is 1000 MW and up.

To get an idea of scale, today's forecast peak demand in California is around 30,000 MW. During the summer, it can be as high as 45,000 MW. If California has a problem now, wait until this summer which is supposed to be hot (i.e. air conditioning loads) and dry (i.e. less hydroelectric from the Northwest).

If it was easy to build large powerplants, someone would have done so, since the wholesale electricity prices in California have been high for quite a while now, and it has been obvious to many for years that demand was outpacing supply.