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Come on, America, it's time to be the adults, look under our own beds, and assure ourselves that the Nuclear Boogeyman is just our imagination.

Whilst the radionuclides and other byproducts of the nuclear industry, like depleted uranium, radio active CFCs, megalitres of radioactive sulfuric acid from mining remain in the environment.

Effective advocates of nuclear power would pose solutions to these issues instead of trying to convince people it's all in their head. This willful ignorance is far more damaging to the unclear industry than any NIMBY could be.

We need nuclear power. Safe nuclear power isn't 'theoretical', it's a reality; there are safer reactor designs on the drawing board right now, but since everyone seems to lose their bladder containment whenever the subject comes up, no money gets allocated into developing them.

Sure, it's just so expensive that no sane investor wants to go near it because whilst it is still prone to human error they are unlikely to see a return on their investment in their lifetime.

Evidence of this is that none of the nuclear plant designs in existence incorporate any of the 30 known improvements to nuclear reactor plant design suggested by industry at the behest of the NRC. Any serious advocate of nuclear power would be lobbying the NRC to make these changes to nuclear reactor design mandatory.

You would also be lobbying to have laws surrounding the illegality of spent fuel facilities in granite removed. However I bet you don't even know that is a law that exists to prevent the proper development of the nuclear industry, it's just easier to blame NIMBYs.

Of course none of this can even begin to happen until 2020; we need to get the current bozo out of office,

I'm not gonna touch that one.

Once we get past that hurdle and back into a sane energy policy, new reactor designs can be developed and implemented. That'll take at least 10 years though.

An entire section (600) in the 2005 US energy policy act is devoted to funding nuclear energy. It is encouraged in every way but used as a means for oil and coal to raid taxpayers wallets because they are the only ones who can *afford* to build them. Solar, wind and everything else are left out where the funding burden is put onto the business sector, with everything else.

Meanwhile continuing development and deployment of solar and wind power, in conjuction with large-scale energy storage strategies, should tide us over, and as capacity in these technologies increases, old-fashioned outdated filthy fossil-fuel-based power plants can be shuttered. Tear them down and build solar farms, so we can reuse the grid connections to them.

I've heard rumbling of converting aging nuclear power plants to natural gas so as to utilise the turbine infrastructure. This is good because we need a way to make it profitable to maintain the sites where the spent fuel is stored until a cetralized repository and infrastructure can be built.

In order to facilitate faster adoption of plug-in electric vehicles, there should be new government programs to promote them. Rebates, credits for decomissioning ICE vehicles, grants to municipalities to fund change-over from diesel buses to electrics, ad campaigns promoting electrics. Get as many people as possible off ICE-based transportation and into electrics.

Part of the dream of Burner reactors is that they can produce enough hydrogen to replace oil as a fuel that maintains the existing vehicle fleet whilst reducing their effective carbon footprint to zero.

Meanwhile continue funding development of practical fusion technology, to eventually replace fission technology.

I've got no problem with the continued develo

That's not necessarily according true according to PJM. PJM is, per FERC:

The PJM Interconnection operates a competitive wholesale electricity market and manages the reliability of its transmission grid. PJM provides open access to the transmission and performs long-term planning. In managing the grid, PJM centrally dispatches generation and coordinates the movement of wholesale electricity in all or part of 13 states (Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia) and the District of Columbia. PJM’s markets include energy (day-ahead and real-time), capacity and ancillary services.

PJM was founded in 1927 as a power pool of three utilities serving customers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. In 1956, with the addition of two Maryland utilities, it became the Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland Interconnection, or PJM. PJM became a fully functioning ISO in 1996 and, in 1997, it introduced markets with bid-based pricing and locational market pricing (LMP). PJM was designated an RTO in 2001.

Per PJM's Capacity Construct Senior Task Force:
* All energy resources receive federal subsidies
– can have a similar impact on markets as state subsidies
* MOPR does not examine whether existing resources have previously benefited from subsidy
* State actions like a prompt siting decision or a favorable zoning exemption may provide more economic benefit than a subsidy

* Federal policies
– Fossil has received 65% of federal support to date versus less than 3% for wind

* Portfolio standards include:
– Coal: mine methane (PA, IN); waste coal (PA); advanced coal (IN, PA, MI)
– Natural Gas (IN)
– Nuclear (IN, OH)
– CHP & Cogen (OH, NC, IN, MI, OH)
– Landfill gas (DC, DE, IL, MD, MI, NC, PA, VA)
– Waste-to-energy (MD, MI, IN, NJ, OH, PA)
– New, retrofitted or repowered generating facility (OH)
– Waste from animal, ag operations (DE, IL, IN, MD, OH); industrial energy recovery (IN); paper and wood industries (PA)

* State funding for coal (KY)
– R&D funding
– Mining workforce development and job training
* Tax breaks
– Review is complex, limited in scope
* OECD assessed 3 states within PJM
* Tax breaks for coal, petroleum, natural gas (KY, PA, WV)
* OH – tax breaks for natural gas, coal, all fuels
* PA – tax credits for waste coal generation and natural gas infrastructure
– Indicates conventional energy may be a significant beneficiary of tax breaks

* Tax credits/other incentives to attract/retain industries
– Coal: Clean Coal Power Operations ($550m, KY, 2008); Kentucky Syngas ($250m, KY, 2007); Duke Energy ($204m, IN, 2006; Cash Creek Generation ($150m, KY, 2008); Secure Energy Inc. ($85m, KY, 2011)
– Petroleum: Marathon Petroleum ($186m, MI, 2007; $78m, OH, 2011)
– Natural gas: Dominion Resources ($506m, MD, 2013)

* Fossil fuel transportation subsidies

There are laws about how to declassify information and it's not just "because the SOS said so".

You did read that link first before posting?

The Chairman, Vice Chairman, and Executive Director exercise downgrading and declassification authority in the FERC.

I was not aware that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission set the classification standards for the State Department.

http://www.ferc.gov/

Maybe this link will provide some insights. Although it doesn't mention who declassifies information, it's reasonable to assume that the person who has the authority to classify information can also declassify information.

In the State Department, original classification authority for top secret info goes to the secretary of state or anyone the secretary has said -- in writing -- can do the job. Past examples include: "Deputy Secretaries, the Under Secretaries, the Counselor, Assistant Secretaries and equivalents; Chiefs of Mission and U.S. representatives to international organizations."

Secret or classified information is decided on by the secretary and/or a senior agency official, who can give classification power to others in writing as well.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/08/21/everything-you-need-to-know-about-how-the-state-department-classifies-information/

Google "demand response". Too lazy? Ok, google in particular the FERC's "Assessment of Demand Response & Advanced Metering staff report", it's a yearly report on demand response and how it affects consumer demand. Too lazy to do that? Ok, here's the 2006 report: http://www.ferc.gov/legal/staf... Too lazy to read the table of contents? Ok, the stuff you're looking for is in pages 114-117.

I think your first statement affirmed what I was saying. Most (not all) burglaries are unsophisticated. For the buglers that are planning well, they already know the occupant is not home by existing means. It's fairly well known that most affluent people work the day shift and would be way easier to confirm by driving by than trying to hack a website as the folks that can hack websites would probably be better off doing computer crime.

There is no way to air gap the SCADA for the energy grid these days. The reality is since monopolies are bad and markets solve everything (yes that’s sarcasm) energy is now traded in markets. A map is located at http://www.ferc.gov/market-oversight/mkt-electric/overview.asp if you are interested. Any company that air gapped their SCADA would be a huge competitive disadvantage then all of the others in that market. Also that data is very valuable to engineers doing planning so they know where to do upgrades etc. That being said, those systems aren't just thrown on the company network either. There are multiple layers of security and the normal corporate network is treated as a hostile network like the internet.

The portal will be read only information. I would think two factor would be cost prohibitive, however it will surely be https and should be secured. I don't have anything to do with that part of the business, but I do know it's taken seriously. We have an excellent security staff and much of the team comes from a DOD background.

Location is specifically not protected as Critical Energy Infrastructure Information (CEII).

This does not mean that location is necessarily public information to be provided by the government, but FERC specifically sought to keep the location of particular bits of infrastructure out of that data which is considered confidential.

If Schumer has a beef, he should bring it up with FERC.

It's an elegantly simple concept, indeed. The biggest problem is finding the right topograpy (although there are ways to deal with that - but then it becomes less simple). FERC has a paragraph that points out some of the crucial points quite succinctly:

These projects are uniquely suited for generating power when demand for electricity is high and for supplying reserve capacity to complement the output of large fossil-fueled and nuclear steam-electric plants. Start-up of this type of project is almost immediate, thus serving peak demand for power better than fossil-fueled plants that require significantly more start-up time. Like conventional projects, they use falling water to generate power, but they use reversible turbines to pump the water back to the upper reservoir. This type of project is particularly effective at sites having high heads (large differences in elevation between the upper and lower reservoir). /QUOTE

CIP-004 requires a Personel Risk Assessment done for each individual with access and CIP-005 which requires strong authentication for starters. CAN-0005 forbids remote access for a device that is not inside a PSP/ESP and treating the remote access device as a CCA, which in turn makes it subject to CIP-005 & CIP-007. The only exception I could see to provide remote support insight into what you're doing would be if you had a method to allow remote support to see your screen, but not have any sort of control. We have regulations to cover this, regular audits, and fines that back it up ($1M/violation/day).

http://www.ferc.gov/enforcement/civil-penalties.asp

The Toshiba 4S is a reactor with a 10 MW capacity. The peak summer load in New England is 28,130 MW (see link below). So you would need 2,813 of these reactors. Get 50% of New England's power from nukes and thats still 1406.5. Whats the cost to protect them by the way?

Sure, its the next best thing for Galena Alaska. For national energy policy, this is completely irrelevant.

http://www.ferc.gov/market-oversight/mkt-electric/new-england.asp#gen

Enter FERC/NERC which then mandates and fines utilities for not doing the right thing. The bad thing is this puts a burden on utilities already doing the right thing as they now have to deal with NERC audits. In the end, it's they way to go, but it would have been better of the power industry policed itself (but responsibility without authority is pointless, which is where FERC authority to fine millions per day gives NERC the ability to carry out this responsibility).

Enter FERC/NERC which then mandates and fines utilities for not doing the right thing. The bad thing is this puts a burden on utilities already doing the right thing as they now have to deal with NERC audits. In the end, it's they way to go, but it would have been better of the power industry policed itself (but responsibility without authority is pointless, which is where FERC authority to fine millions per day gives NERC the ability to carry out this responsibility).

Whatever happened to the new power grid that President Bush promised before and again after the great American blackout of 2003?

https://www.ferc.gov/eventcalendar/Files/20050608125055-grid-2030.pdf

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,94872,00.html

They were cutting costs, and since there was no oversight from NERC/FERC, they got away with it, just as they did in the years before they were deregulated. Since 2003, NERC has developed an extensive system of regulatory controls and FERC has been given the ability to levy fines to keep compliance.

So I got "lack of oversight" mixed in with "deregulation". You'll pardon, I hope, my mingling of these two related notions under the same umbrella.

As for being wrong, someone already pointed out to you that hydro-quebec wasn't cut apart for their so called failures, but because of the technical nature of their transmission lines, and you'll also note that their failures were due to extraordinary catastrophic events (geomagnetic and ice storms) and not human error, and that they have since taken steps to remedy the weaknesses that allowed these acts of god to mess with our flow of electrons. Which brings me back to my point: We need government oversight (regulation, if you will) to ensure a safe supply, so that only mighty forces of nature, such as the sun's unpredictable eruptions can cause failures, and not mere hackers.

Close, but you got all of the reasons wrong.

FirstEnergy still had a requirement to remove vegetation under its wires (while "dangerously deregulated") under state deregulation just as it did as a vertically integrated company. The fact that their maintenence crews failed to do so was FirstEnergy's flaw, not deregulation. They were cutting costs, and since there was no oversight from NERC/FERC, they got away with it, just as they did in the years before they were deregulated. Since 2003, NERC has developed an extensive system of regulatory controls and FERC has been given the ability to levy fines to keep compliance.

And besides, the root cause of the blackout was a deadlock in the mainframe at FirstEnergy, where their staff failed to properly recognize that the system was reporting old data as if it were fresh. FirstEnergy had over an hour and a half to take action to correct for the loss of the transmission lines, but instead failed to observe the overloads which eventually resulting in the separation of the load around Lake Erie and the eventual blackout along the PA/NJ border between GPU, PS, and NYISO. The government's report was very watered down on this area.

This might help you understand the root causes, instead of blaming some phantom "deregulation" as the root of all evil.

Oh, and Quebec was isolated from the rest of the Eastern Interconnection (connected only via HVDC ties) in 1990 because of its demonstrated repeated inability to stop cascading blackouts, long long before deregulation hit the scene. Quebec physically could not be affected by the 2003 blackout on the HVAC system.

WASHINGTON, DC - In a joint statement issued today Secretary of the Interior (DOI), Ken Salazar and Acting Chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Jon Wellinghoff announced that the two agencies have confirmed their intent to work together to facilitate the permitting of renewable energy in offshore waters.

"Our renewable energy is too important for bureaucratic turf battles to slow down our progress. I am proud that we have reached an agreement with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission regarding our respective roles in approving offshore renewable energy projects. This agreement will help sweep aside red tape so that our country can capture the great power of wave, tidal, wind and solar power off our coasts," Secretary Salazar said.

"FERC is pleased to be working with the Department of the Interior and Secretary Salazar on a procedure that will help get renewable energy projects off the drawing board and onto the Outer Continental Shelf," Acting FERC Chairman Jon Wellinghoff said.

Below is the joint Statement between DOI and FERC signed by Secretary Salazar and Acting Chairman Wellinghoff: JOINT STATEMENT BY THE SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR AND THE ACTING CHAIRMAN OF THE FEDERAL ENERGY REGULATORY COMMISSION ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF RENEWABLE ENERGY RESOURCES ON THE OUTER CONTINENTAL SHELF The United States has significant renewable energy resources in offshore waters, including wind energy, solar energy, and wave and ocean current energy.

Under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, the Secretary of the Interior, acting through the Minerals Management Service, has the authority to grant leases, easements, and rights-of-way on the outer continental shelf for the development of oil and gas resources. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 amended the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to provide the Interior Department with parallel permitting authority with regard to the production, transportation, or transmission of energy from additional sources of energy on the outer continental shelf, including renewable energy sources.

The Interior Department's responsibility for the permitting and development of renewable energy resources on the outer continental shelf is broad. In particular, the Department of the Interior has permitting and development authority over wind power projects that use offshore resources beyond state waters.
Interior's authority does not diminish existing responsibilities that other agencies have with regard to the outer continental shelf. In that regard, under the Federal Power Act, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has the statutory responsibility to oversee the development of hydropower resources in navigable waters of the United States. "Hydrokinetic" power potentially can be developed offshore through new technologies that seek to convert wave, tidal and ocean current energy to electricity. FERC will have the primary responsibility to manage the licensing of such projects in offshore waters pursuant to the Federal Power Act, using procedures developed for hydropower licenses, and with the active involvement of relevant federal land and resource agencies, including the Department of the Interior.

We have requested our staffs to prepare a

Give the electric companies 2 choices: Fix your own damn shit with your profits or we fix it and lease it back to you or nationalize you.

Sure there are people that are going to bitch because they're used to their handout. But handouts aren't going to help anyone. Make everyone work.

It's not perfect but it's a hell of a lot better than handing it over to a bunch of people who managed to already lose $700b.

[0].M-F you live in work housing or you work 4 - 10s or 7 on 7 off.

I hate to ruin your rant with what we call "facts", but the grid in the United States is not owned by private companies that you can just boss around from your ivory tower of uninformed tripe. It is an amalgamation of state-run and multi-state entities called ISOs (Independent System Operators) that both contract and coordinate with the transmission agencies in concert with privately-owned and state-owned generation assets to produce consistent and reliable power. A grid, in the strictest sense of the word, is a series of transmission lines, owned by multiple companies, that are interlinked and under the complete autonomy of the ISO. Nothing happens without the permission and direction of the ISO or FERC (and NERC as its enforcement arm). The grid is aging, but since the ultimate authority to direct replacement lies with both federal, state, and multi-state agencies, who precisely in your little world bears the fiscal burden?

May I suggest for your education:
http://www.ferc.gov/
http://www.nerc.com/

And for ISOs:
http://www.ercot.com/
http://www.caiso.com/
http://www.nyiso.com/public/index.jsp
http://www.pjm.com/index.jsp
http://www.midwestiso.org/home

Find the one that serves your area, and berate them with your uninformed bile since you obviously understand all of this better than anyone else.

Or do you?

I'm happy to help. I was one of the author of the interconnection rules at FERC, and follow the issue fairly carefully now that I'm out in the "real world". If your focus is on large scale renewables, you need to read the proposal from California on interconnecting Locationally Constrained Resources (read: solar and wind in the middle of god-foresaken-nowhere) -- the final FERC order is here -- http://www.ferc.gov/industries/electric/indus-act/ gi/wind.asp, but you could learn a lot from the pleadings filed by the CAISO and Califonia CPUC in the docket.

Anyway -- If you'd like to get in touch, I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have. My email is asilverman at perkins coie dot com (all one word, obviously). I can talk about this stuff for hours. Depending on what specific aspects you're looking at, I might also be able to suggest other folks for you to talk to. And I certainly work for booze :)

Good luck!

Excellent question. Actually, quite a few. In no particular order:

First, they are keeping electricity prices high by keeping competing sources of generation from interconnecting with the grid and supplying energy to the competitive energy markets. Interconnection of a generating facility can be prohibitively expensive when a utility exercises its monopoly power to discriminate against a generator. If you're truly interested in this issue, you can start with Order No. 2003, issued in 2003 by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission: http://www.ferc.gov/industries/electric/indus-act/ gi/stnd-gen.asp.

Second, the affects of discrimination are particularly felt by smaller generators using innovative means to generate power. Solar, wind, tidal, biomass and other renewable facilities (that tend to be smaller and already on the margin of cost efficiency) are all greatly harmed by a utility's exercise of monopoly power. By keeping out competition, the utility makes it more difficult for all of us to get access to renewable generation. Again, FERC wrote orders specifically directed to help wind and small units interconnect for just this reason relying on open access principles: http://www.ferc.gov/industries/electric/indus-act/ gi/wind.asp.

Third, every large user of electricity feels the pain brought about by lack of competition in the transmission sector. For some large industrial users of power, electricity constitutes a significant portion of their total materials costs. The aluminum industry, for example, is notorious for its need for electricty. Many chemical processors have similarly astronomical electricity bills. Prior to open access, these customers had only one source for both transmission service and generation service -- their local utility. That's why today, many large industrial users find it easier to pay for a tap to a wholesale transmission line than to just hook up with the local utility. On the transmission side, you can choose your supplier and pay the same standardized transmission rates that the utility itself pays. That's open access. At the local level you are often subject to whatever pound of flesh the local utility can extract.

Fourth, are things like smart metering, demand response, and smart transmission lines. A utility that doesn't have to compete in the open market has zero incentive to innovate and provide things like smart meters to their customers. Once competition set in (again in theory, anyway), there has been substantial innovation in each of these areas.

So actually, there's quite a bit going on. Price is always key in commercial-scale generation and all energy decisions are made on tiny margins (unless you're Enron) -- rather like telcom. When a monopoly uses its power to subtley prevent open access, costs go up and innovation goes down.

Excellent question. Actually, quite a few. In no particular order:

First, they are keeping electricity prices high by keeping competing sources of generation from interconnecting with the grid and supplying energy to the competitive energy markets. Interconnection of a generating facility can be prohibitively expensive when a utility exercises its monopoly power to discriminate against a generator. If you're truly interested in this issue, you can start with Order No. 2003, issued in 2003 by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission: http://www.ferc.gov/industries/electric/indus-act/ gi/stnd-gen.asp.

Second, the affects of discrimination are particularly felt by smaller generators using innovative means to generate power. Solar, wind, tidal, biomass and other renewable facilities (that tend to be smaller and already on the margin of cost efficiency) are all greatly harmed by a utility's exercise of monopoly power. By keeping out competition, the utility makes it more difficult for all of us to get access to renewable generation. Again, FERC wrote orders specifically directed to help wind and small units interconnect for just this reason relying on open access principles: http://www.ferc.gov/industries/electric/indus-act/ gi/wind.asp.

Third, every large user of electricity feels the pain brought about by lack of competition in the transmission sector. For some large industrial users of power, electricity constitutes a significant portion of their total materials costs. The aluminum industry, for example, is notorious for its need for electricty. Many chemical processors have similarly astronomical electricity bills. Prior to open access, these customers had only one source for both transmission service and generation service -- their local utility. That's why today, many large industrial users find it easier to pay for a tap to a wholesale transmission line than to just hook up with the local utility. On the transmission side, you can choose your supplier and pay the same standardized transmission rates that the utility itself pays. That's open access. At the local level you are often subject to whatever pound of flesh the local utility can extract.

Fourth, are things like smart metering, demand response, and smart transmission lines. A utility that doesn't have to compete in the open market has zero incentive to innovate and provide things like smart meters to their customers. Once competition set in (again in theory, anyway), there has been substantial innovation in each of these areas.

So actually, there's quite a bit going on. Price is always key in commercial-scale generation and all energy decisions are made on tiny margins (unless you're Enron) -- rather like telcom. When a monopoly uses its power to subtley prevent open access, costs go up and innovation goes down.

spending $50M for underground and for sake of argument 0 for maintenance of the same period.

First you are working under the assumption that if you put anything in the ground, it is preserved perfectly forever. You will *never* put something in the ground and do 0 maintenance on it for even 5 years. Ask anyone who works in a NAP, or does fiber work how many times a month they have to do maintenance because of anything. Backhoes, trees, and vermin as stated in a previous post, have an odd way of breaking things that is left under dirt.

There is no market for power distribution. If you are dissatisfied by the reliability of your electrical grid, you cannot switch to a competitor's grid. The owners of the grid will charge you the cost of running the grid plus as much as they can get away with over that.

Just for research check out and dig through the following:
http://www.ferc.gov/ Federal Electricity Regulatory Commission
http://www.nerc.com/ North American Electric Reliability Council
http://www.pjm.com/ PJM Regional Transmission Organization
http://www.midwestiso.org/ Midwest Independant Transmission System Operator, Inc.

The most amazing thing about the electrical grid is that it works at all. And indeed most of the time it works well when compared to, say, Iraq. But although it works in routine cases, it does not work in even moderately exceptional cases, such as peak demand for air conditioning. And it certainly does not work to address problems like the California power crisis of several years ago.

It is only amazing that something that is watched over by the government is able to function as efficiently as the Electric Grid, other than that standards and policies and procedures out the rear are in place to ensure that the lights stay on. Also, as someone else already said to you, the situation in California was staged specifically to line the pockets of officers of a Public Utility.

Looking forward two to three decades, the electrical grid is probably the single most important piece of infrastucture to improve

The grid is being upgraded on a regular basis. It is known that the US is power hungry (in the electic sense here) and Utilities are working almost daily to get funding, and zoning, and laws to build more distribution sites. Bureaucracy is a slow, tedious process.

And, like someone else said, get a generator. Home Depot has them that, when connected through a special breaker box, can be online and running within seconds. I think they'll run on propane or natural gas. Diesel ones are available but more expensive.

Also, consider putting up either solar or wind generation. Our state (Oregon) has a requirement that net positive producers of power, even at the residential level, must be able to sell their extra power back to the power company at the rate they are charged for it. So, if it's fairly sunny or fairly windy where you are (or you have some sort of cheap access to diesel or something), you can get paid by the power company instead of the other way around.

Regarding Net Metering, you asked "Why do we allow laws that strip us of potential income, and benefit companies like PG&E?"

Well, it's actually a bit more complicated than all that. One of the major problems with building a new generator is getting that generator to play nice with the existing transmission/distribution grid. This business of connecting the generator with the grid is called "interconnection." It's not an easy thing to interconnect a generator, and hooking up new green power technologies is especially troublesome. (Wind is the most difficult, with solar being the easiest.)

The federal government has been working on creating new standardized rules for interconnection of small (read: green) generators, but it's an incredibly complicated process that's taking years to complete and isn't even done yet.

So, what does all this have to do with Net Metering, you ask? Well everything.

Net Metering is a state jurisdictional program (meaning each state has its own rules) that avoids the whole interconnection process. While you are still hooking up with the grid, the power flows involved in a Net Metering program are so small in comparison that the process is much quicker and much, much cheaper.

The deal is however, that you cannot export (meaning feed energy into the grid) more power than you consume over the course of the billing period (usually a month).

Take a photovoltaic system - during the day a well built system (and we're not talking people who are entirely off the grid here) may both supply the energy needs of your house and produce some extra energy. That energy is sent out to the grid. Your electric meter essentially runs backwards for that period of time. Then, at night, you resume taking energy from the grid to run your house. At that point your meter is running forward and your bill is increasing. Say over the course of a month you take 1000 kw of electricity of the grid at 8 cents / kw. Usually your bill would be $80. But, over the course of that same month say you pumped 100 kw of energy back into the grid (for a net consumption of 900 kw) - you would receive an $8 credit off of your bill.

Now take the example of Farmer Brown who wants to turn shit into gold (that's the phrase the brochures use - "shit into gold"). Say he (through whatever means) puts 10,000 kw (or 10 MW) onto the system - all of a sudden he likely no longer qualifies for a net metering program and has to take the trouble of actually entering into an interconnection agreement and conducting studies to make sure he's not going to fry some lineman somewhere further down the grid (or more likely, simply overload the local lines and fry a small portion of the grid). Sure, he'd love to use net metering - the utility is required to buy whatever power he produces, the price is set at the retail price for electricity, the price of interconnection is cheap, but he's no longer eligible. So he has to go through the interconnection process, find buyers to buy his energy at wholesale (either by himself, or more likely through what are called "Aggregators"), and he's basically in the energy business with all the regulations and resonsibilities that entails.

But don't feel too sorry for Farmer Brown -- turns out that one of the major expenses in running a dairy farm (who knew) is electricity! Most spend thousands and thousands of dollars on their electric bill every month - so to the extent they can offset even a portion of that through net metering, that there shit really is golden!

I disagree, government is never the answer if you want something truely fixed. There are plenty of rules in place on how to maintain a reliable system, rules formed by the industry itself as "best practice" procedures; not to mention that there's already an alliance called NERC for US & Canada who's supposed to be managing it. A similar government commission FERC exists for setting USA policy only. Thirdly, there's another coallition called NAESB who sets the common standards for energy markets.

What doesn't exist is legally binding penalties on those who don't follow the "best practices" on how to run a control area. (Why can't we sue our utility company like we could any other private industry? Government.) Most of FirstEnergy's failures documented in the final report were not because there weren't any rules in place, it's that they weren't obeying the procedures already laid out; procedures that would have notified neighbors they were having issues, giving them time to rebalance the energy flows. This is a change that's been in the big "energy bill" for the last 4 years as the Senate sits and refuses to act on it, as the Democrats won't have anything to do with Republican proposed bills. The politicians have been arguing about Standard Market Design for 3 years, no progress. Private industry realized it needed common market rules for better efficiency and cost savings, so it's been implementing it themselves. If you leave things to the government, they argue and argue and nothing gets done.

The recent proposals, including the IEEE paper you link to, want to mandate additional collection equipment on every utility company in North America, so that one (government, of course) agency can collect all the data and have the big picture view. Well, in the next two years thanks to private industry advances brought on by deregulation, we may be down from hundreds to maybe 10 private institutions called Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs) that will have the same big picture of vast swaths of the USA, with no government involvement whatsoever. That's the path I'd rather see.

I disagree, government is never the answer if you want something truely fixed. There are plenty of rules in place on how to maintain a reliable system, rules formed by the industry itself as "best practice" procedures; not to mention that there's already an alliance called NERC for US & Canada who's supposed to be managing it. A similar government commission FERC exists for setting USA policy only. Thirdly, there's another coallition called NAESB who sets the common standards for energy markets.

What doesn't exist is legally binding penalties on those who don't follow the "best practices" on how to run a control area. (Why can't we sue our utility company like we could any other private industry? Government.) Most of FirstEnergy's failures documented in the final report were not because there weren't any rules in place, it's that they weren't obeying the procedures already laid out; procedures that would have notified neighbors they were having issues, giving them time to rebalance the energy flows. This is a change that's been in the big "energy bill" for the last 4 years as the Senate sits and refuses to act on it, as the Democrats won't have anything to do with Republican proposed bills. The politicians have been arguing about Standard Market Design for 3 years, no progress. Private industry realized it needed common market rules for better efficiency and cost savings, so it's been implementing it themselves. If you leave things to the government, they argue and argue and nothing gets done.

The recent proposals, including the IEEE paper you link to, want to mandate additional collection equipment on every utility company in North America, so that one (government, of course) agency can collect all the data and have the big picture view. Well, in the next two years thanks to private industry advances brought on by deregulation, we may be down from hundreds to maybe 10 private institutions called Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs) that will have the same big picture of vast swaths of the USA, with no government involvement whatsoever. That's the path I'd rather see.

Last I heard Oracle was, probably for PR reasons if not goodwill, going to let the state off the hook, same for Logicon which negotiated the *cough* no bid *cough* contract.

There's other fun fish to fry for California, if you've not heard, Enron documents detailing the strategy to screw California by playing shell games with power, actually written in 2000 by Enron lawyers. What a mess.

BTW, trying to find the smoking-gun-memo on FERC I got this It's December 3869, do you know how to set a system clock?

Last I heard Oracle was, probably for PR reasons if not goodwill, going to let the state off the hook, same for Logicon which negotiated the *cough* no bid *cough* contract.

There's other fun fish to fry for California, if you've not heard, Enron documents detailing the strategy to screw California by playing shell games with power, actually written in 2000 by Enron lawyers. What a mess.

BTW, trying to find the smoking-gun-memo on FERC I got this It's December 3869, do you know how to set a system clock?