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Dark City, San Francisco?
tavern writes: "San Francisco is going to start rolling blackouts today! I can see the headlines for the Onion tomorrow, 'United States Declared a 3rd World Nation'" The article reads like something out of Atlas Shrugged -- parts shortages and clogged intakes for power plants' cooling water are contributing to the energy strain. However, from this piece, it seems like the (intentional) blackouts remain potential rather than actual. Can anyone out thataway comment on the power situation as it affects you? (I'd be out buying a UPS right now ...)
I dunno. We in the U.S. do a pretty good job of kicking the French on our own, thanks :-)
Dog is my co-pilot.
It would seem that they have changed their minds, no?
um - if you don't like that absolute Gem of a city, why don't you move someplace else, like Orlando?
In Orlando, the strippers can't even strip.
(they tried to skirt that law by exploiting the "artistic performance" loophole, so at all the strip joints, for a while last year, every Thursday was "Shakespeare night". I shit you not.)
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
You just made that up. The USA is responsible for 25% of the world's CO2 emmissions, with about 5% of the population. Your cars are hopelessly un-green (40mpg is about the average in Europe).
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Not all but their idiotic policies contributed greatly to the problem.
Uh.. you _do_ know who Nash Bridges is, right? I was joking. (-:
Tune into CBS tonight at.. uh 10pm your(our) time.
precisely. The things we do affect each other. Hence it's nonsense to say "I have an absolute right to do so-and-so with my private property". If you're harming the rest of us enough, our rights may outweigh yours.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
I totally agree with DrHyde - get a good atlas and look at the GDP of a middle-eastern oil producing country, like Iraq or Brunai. Their GDP is artificially high because of the few oilfield owners and merchants that get $$$ per second. Most of the inhabitants of the country have little or no $flow, they're mostly Bedouins or similar.
.uk and .us, they're pretty similar. The PQLI is the Physical Quality of Life Index, and it takes into account many things, such as doctors per 100 people, % of country with electricity supply and running water. % country with inside/outside/no sanitary facilities, population birth/death rates and public transport availability.
.sigfault
Compare the PQLI index of
Have fun...
Alex
Feel that power? That's mah MOUSING FINGER
I think the problem with the emissions laws is that they fail to take the real problems into account.
First of all; old cars are dying anyway. They're the first cars to get towed when there's a street full of cars that have been parked since the taft administration. I know, because it happened to one of mine, even after I moved it to another street. They get hit, people hit things in them, et cetera.
Second, many of the cars that are polluting and considered to be inefficient actually get better mileage than many cars being produced and sold today. The F-150 lightning gets 10mpg. (+/- 10%) So does the Ferrari F355. Neither of these cars are in wide distribution due to cost, so don't get all uppity on me. Look at the mileage of some of those big SUVs that the soccer moms love to buy these days, and you'll see what I mean.
Third, the laws take away the hot hopped-up import (rice) cars because they don't have OEM equipment or supposedly don't meet emissions. If I pop the KA24E out of my '89 240SX and drop in a J-Spec CA18DET (1.8 liter, DOHC, Turbo) or a SR20DET (2.0 liter, DOHC, turbo) motor, my emissions will be about the same (probably +/- 10%) and still be immeasurably better than an SUV or big truck, and used to carry about the same number of people (one or two, typically) but will be in violation of the smog laws. This is stupid.
Fourth, I do agree with the point about infringing your rights to breathe clean air. I just quit smoking recently, but even before I quit I was of the opinion that my right to smoke was not greater than someone else's right to clean air, but in fact it was lesser. I also believe that I have the right to smoke marijuana or drive like a madman as long as I'm not affecting anyone else. The law disagrees, but that's a discussion for another time.
Anyway, smog laws are misguided. Any smog law which defines different amounts of pollutants for different vehicles is obviously improper. There should be one standard for work vehicles, and one standard for non-work vehicles, with restrictions on use, and so on. The standards should get less and less draconian as you approach the smog cut-off, and we already have a cut-off, so that doesn't need to be added. This preserves rolling pieces of our history, which should not be discarded simply because they are polluting; A 1960 Dodge Phoenix with a big block 318 which has been tuned properly uses less gas and releases less pollution than a 2000 model year Ford F150 with problems with its engine sensors, and I bet there's a number of those out there.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Hmm. Royalty getting killed by press is highly amusing - and we have enough royalty to go round. Our tax burden is manageable, although the Blairite government is doing its best to change that. And I mentioned the euro-brit problems..
So what if California is bigger. Check the respective population sizes. And surely if California has more demand, it should have more supply. For instance, purchasing spare capacity from other nearby states to meet peak demand. Which doesn't happen. Hence my post.
I'm not sure how to interpret your ISP reference. Maybe I should give back my cable modem? Computers use very little electricity anyway - consumer use is considerably higher from ovens, tumbledryers, kettles, toasters, fridges, freezers, hairdryers, etc. I understood the California problem to result from the industrial usage - chip plants alone probably account for more usage than all the consumer use in the state.
Of course, I'm guessing here. Feel free to dig out some numbers.
~Cederic
There is such a thing as excess. When environmental regulations become more of a burden than a help, they need examination as well. This is lost on most liberals, who assume the environment is some ultimate good that should never, ever be bent to helping people.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Wait a minute. There are power shortages, in part, because there's too many people in California and they're using too much electricity with their computers, air conditioning, heat, stereos, etc. and you're attacking conservation?
What about a Fiero? They only made em from 84-88.
Or the incredibly fast Buick Regal T-type and Buick Grand National. Those were made from 197x to 1987. Those are arguably the last true musclecars.
3.8L SFI Turbo V6. Very clean burning, and some of them get 25-30 MPG. Not bad for the size of them, or how fast they are.
Many consider them a collector's item. They're also a great body to build replica's of other cars onto. (e.g., there are "lamborghini" conversion kits for Fieros).Highly. The Fiero is an insanely cool car. But, you know, most people think that they're front wheel drive, or that they're cheap plastic, or that they're dangerous, or that they're poorly built. Or they get scared of the fact that the gas tank sits between the driver and passenger.
In fact, Fieros are groundbreaking in many respects. They're the first mass-produced plastic-bodied car, a role model for the Saturn and the Pontiac TransSport/Montana/Lumina APV. They've got amazing brakes, rear wheel drive, four wheel independent suspension with double A-arms up front, a weight ratio of 49/51 rear, and they were the most crash-safe vehicle when they came out (35 MPH front impact).
And the gas tank couldn't be in a safer place: by the time the gas tank ruptures, you'd be dead from the impact anyway.
While they had design problems - mostly due to the fact that they're really an economy car, not a sports car, and they don't stand up well to the hard driving most of them experience - they're a great little car. And a milestone in American automobiles.
BTW, how do new cars get to survive long enough to be someday considered "vintage" if they all go into the crusher in 10 years?Well, the guy to whom you're replying said it himself. He's painted a broad stroke (with the exception of RX-7s and Porsches, of course) that there were no cars worth saving since 1980.
Of course, that's absolute bullcrap.
How about a Dodge Omni GLH, which is a 4-door Dodge Omni hatchback with a 2.2L or 2.5L turbocharged motor built by Shelby? How about the Mustang 5.0 of the '80s? How about the Cordoba and Mirada personal luxury cars? How about the first K-cars as (slow-moving and mundane) museum pieces? Hell, in 20 years, people will be collecting the very first minivans and SUVs. I guarantee it.
And does the cot off date for "vintage" and for "smog test exemptions" advance each year?No, actually, it seems to go *back* every year. It starts in 1966 now, though *everything* must pass a basic standard (ie. no blue smoke, no obvious problems) before that. It's gonna be really interesting if they try to hook a Ford Model T or something like that up to a tailpipe sniffer - those had driver-operated ignition timing, so it will depend on the skill of the guy testing the car.
It's completely ridiculous, since these things don't account for any percentage of the total miles travelled in any given year.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
This is a LIE. There is no good reason for California to need to import electricity at all, since we have a lot of oil, gas, and hydro resources here in state, and plenty of places to put power plants. The problem is that environmental rules have made it impossible to build nuclear power plants at all since Diablo Canyon, and almost impossible to build power plants at all, because there's always some pseudo-environmental group of NIMBYs who can clog up the approval process enough to make any project uneconomic.
Meanwhile, it's a bunch of stupid liberal (but I'm being redundant) economic regulations built into something the liberals called deregulation that have caused the immediate crisis.
California's environmental regulations provide much more benefit to lawyers than to the environment. Most other western states have much simpler systems, where taking a shit doesn't require permits from 5 different agencies with mutually incompatible requirements, and manage to obtain virtually the same results, except for the increase in legal fees that California has "enjoyed".
You can try making sure the population doesn't increase as much or at all. Whoops! Sorry, not a politically correct idea.
Yes, but it's such good fun!
~Cederic
ps: if you check, I did say "historically". Deny it, go on, I dare you.
pps: Lost, one sense of humour. Please contact oh_the_warcow on discovery
oh yeah, and rust is mainly a problem in the snow belt because of the unnecessary practice of salting roads. Sand? Cinders?
I agree. I hate salt, it's nasty. Sand would be great, except that it doesn't dissolve like salt does, so when it gets washed into sewers, it clogs them. That's the primary reason why sand isn't used.
Salt kills plants and trees,And the sand that makes it out of sewers gets into streams and collects on the streambed, which kills all the aquatic plants.
it's non-renewable, it essentially DOUBLES the cost of car ownership for people living in areas where roads are salted (cars last on average half to a third as long as they would otherwise for a given climate). There are alternatives that are safer, cheaper, and more environmentally sound, but the politicians are too wrapped up. It was actually an argument FOR salt to say that it increased economic activity by dissolving people's cars, and giving detroit auto workers jobs.I've never heard of an ice melter that's as good as salt for less money. It sucks, I agree, but unless someone wants to open up the budgets a bit, we're stuck with it.
The Province of Ontario was looking to ditch salt because of its hidden costs: damage to pavement and cement. It causes millions of dollars of damage to bridges and stuff every year. Until the purse strings are opened a bit more, we're stuck with it.
Until then, I keep the welder handy so that I can weld in new patch panels on my daily driver, and I powerwash then Tremclad the underside every autumn.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Of course, guess who wanted it this way?
The utilities which are now complaining about being bankrupt.
Who spent the most money lobbying for this exact deregulation law?
The same utilities that are now complaining of going backrupt.
Who has been charging every all Californians a 10% surcharge on their electrical bill to bail them out of unprofitabel assets?
The same utilities that are about to go bankrupt.
Who has been buying power on the open market for the last 5 years before this crisis, at reduced cost, yet not only continued getting the same rate from customers, but got 10% more due to the above?
The same utilities that are going bankrupt.
Screw them and their investors. Let them go bankrupt, go undr court supervision. Have all of there investors lose their shirts. It is only fair play since htey have been screwing every Californian for the last 5 years. Who knows maybe onoe of those silicon valley companies that doesn't give a damn about anything, but keeping the power on at any cost will buy the utility in order to keep their own power on.
How many small to medium businesses are going to go under because of this whole power issue? How many jobs will be lost?
And, remember this is exaclty how the utilities wnated it, so they shoudl have to pay for it.
Dastardly
Well, that doesn't answer it either. We need to find the energy sources that don't kill us or make us bury glowing rocks in canisters. The answers are out there. It just needs researching. Nuclear breeder reactors are very intriguing. I think we need to put our heads together and come up with a real solution to dealing with nuclear waste and pursue nuclear power to its fullest potential instead of being afraid of it and/or using (republican owned) fossil fuels. You do not have to get "dirty". You have to get creative and stop being scared. Why can't we send high-energy nuclear waste into space toward the sun? Because we're scared that the ship will blow up and kill us. If we can't build equipment that doesn't blow up, then we need help. We need to get the Tokamac working. We need to reduce the cost and weight of fuel cells, we need to ABOLISH electric energy distribution using private generation equipment (which WILL happen eventually). We need to develop liquid nitrogen powered vehicles (http://www.aa.washington.edu/AERP/CRYOCAR/CryoCar .htm). any and all of these things need to be done. but the REPUBLICANS who own the BIG BUSINESSES (Exxon, Gulf Oil, Ford, Chrysler, GM) and can't see more then 1 inch from their noses and don't give a rat's ass about anything but their pocketbooks (future generations, other humans, their own families, themselves etc.) don't want that. Witness the 100 MPG carbeurator legends. We also need to abolish money (yes, like Star Trek "you mean they still use money?") and move on to what is possible instead of what there's enough money for. But alas, no one is creative or free enough to do that. Money sucks and everything that has to do with money sucks. And this whole thing has a lot to do with money.
Knowledge is like ignorance.. too much can be just as bad as not enough.
I suspect you misinterpret the reasons - if nothing else, I strongly suspect that the US uses far more power industrially than the UK - the consumer usage per head of population may well be considerably more equitable.
And this does not alter my argument. Why can't California buy power from neighbouring states, instead of just running out. Even if the US uses more power overall, I refuse to believe that they can't generate more power overall too.
~Cederic
Born and raised in MI, I've always been jealous of kids elsewhere in the US who could always look forward to a few random days off each year -- snow days. The potential for blackouts makes me feel like a kid again! I cross my fingers when they begin, and hope I'll get to go home and play in the snow!
No luck yet...
J
I had a feeling you were going to say that.
Planning to be moderated ± 1: Bad Pun.
It also happened in 1989 of course, Oct 17, during the world series. But that was because of the Loma Preita earthquake. From across the bay in Berkeley, I could see SF pitch black except for the huge marina fire, which I saw through my small telescope. It was a good night for stargazing.
Uh, lack of cooling water.
That's why the fuel for the bombs was made in reactors on major rivers or near the seacoast.
Or how about nuclear power, the French way? The plant costs a bit more to make because of all the stuff you need to contain the liquid sodium, but despite that, it's much easier to maintain than a water-cooled plant because the sodium doesn't corrode the pipes. I don't exactly know the full details, but apparently, despite the chemical reactivity, liquid sodium is a much safer coolant than water. Besides, you need very little of it, since it's a metal, so you can dump water on it in an emergency and not worry about a catastrophic hydrogen explosion. The French also use a particular kind of breeder reactor, which uses up almost all of its fuel, instead of 5% or so, nearly eliminating waste. Yeah, it costs a lot up front, but it's clean and safe and it lasts. Nuclear power has come a long way since the Chernobyl reactor was designed. Sure, fusion will be the paradise, but that's a long way off. Fission the French way is arguably cleaner than even hydroelectric, (missing from your list, though many may not know why) because of the effect the dam has on the ecosystem.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
It grabs numbers from SoCal Edison and charts previous power consumption with current power consumption and projected black-out times.
Anyway,
I'm an undergrad in college in California. We've been having regular power outages ordered by the power company since early this summer. The school saves money by electing to cut our power first in exchange for reduced (slightly) power rates. This power crisis has had the following negative impacts on our lives:
-If we have to keep the power on (Finals, presentation days, etc.) we pay 10x the rate we would normally pay. This translates into $4000 an hour if we keep the dorms lit and turn off the other buildings.
Note: if a stage 3 emergency is called, we still lose our power.
Besides financial woes:
-The chemistry department closes down because the fume hoods aren't powered. I'm all for noxious chemicals, but if you can't control them you're sunk.
-The library loses power. Lost research time.
-The cafeteria closes or only serves cold-cuts and fruit. Cafeteria food is bad enough, but to add insult to injury.
-Night labs have to be rescheduled. You can't collect data on a swinging pendulum in the physics lab without electricity.
-Without electricity to power the lights, homework is really hard to get done. The gym has an emergency generator, but it only accomodates so many people. And the more people working in one area, the louder the noise becomes, the harder it is to do work.
I won't pretend to know what's going on in detail, but I've heard lots of smart people saying that the root cause is that California's power companies have discovered that the economics of shortage are more profitable than the economics of full supply.
The best way to make a profit in any system is to skim the cream off the top. Providing service from the cream all the way down to the dregs (if I might so mix metaphors) is not nearly so lucrative.
I don't know about you, but I'd love to be able to supply non-price-regulated electricity to california right now. And I bet every power company in the country would, too. In an economic situation like this any intelligent supplier will be making as much product as possible to keep up with demand, since they'll be able to sell as much as they can make. Or ever better, I'll make more than the demand is but I'll sell it for less than my competitors, forcing them to slice their prices also. I don't know who these smart people are, but they're wrong.
The traditional model of supply and demand never claimed that all consumers would get as much as they wanted. Or even needed.
Actually, that's pretty much what the laws of supply and demand do say. If by 'want' you mean that the consumers are willing to pay a reasonable cost such that the manufacturer can make a normal profit then more and more suppliers will keep entering the industry until prices drop to the point where it's not profitable to enter the industry.
Mr. Spey
Cover your butt. Bernard is watching.
Cover your butt. Bernard is watching.
The building that I am in now can opperate normaly off a back up diesel generator for 5 days with out refuleing. That also goes for some of the casinos here in Vegas. The only way you can tell if the power on the strip is out is if the street lights are off. Travis
Uh, well we have. Technology hasn't advanced enough to make solar practical (like destroying desert eco systems by covering them with solar collectors is anymore friendly), California has hundreds of motionless windmills in the altamonts, (we tried, we really did!). Let's see. Geothermal. I'm willing to give it a try. Ship us a volcano and we'll hook it up. Tidal power. Now this hasn't been tried on a large scale, true, but whether it's successful or not, the marine life is going to want to have a word with you.
I'm not a nuclear avocate (yet) but I get tired of people assuming those in favor of nuclear power are not ecologically conscious or informed.
J
Who moderates the meta-moderators?
There is a lot of good detail, background and opinion on this whole debacle in the discussion over on kuro5hin.org about this issue. I'm still not sure who started it all though.
Seriously, we make fun of people who get days off from snow. It means one of two things: 1. They live somewhere where they don't know how to drive in snow and sit inside until it is all gone or 2. They live out in the sticks and they have to stay home and defrost the cows or whatever they do when it is really cold.
I had a feeling you were going to say that.
Planning to be moderated ± 1: Bad Pun.
Who calls this a free market? It's not a free market, it's a "differently regulated" market.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
The politicians are trying to blame the free market to cover for their own problems.
Free market and de-regulation are in no way synonymous. Deregulation was an attempt to replace the government monopolized power production in CA with a free market system. An attempt that failed thanks to the machinations of several powerful energy companies which hijacked the plan and replaced the government monopoly with their own. They then went on to schedule "scheduled matinence" at peak months of consumption to drive up the wholesale price and pad their profits. Thankfully the CA Attorney General is currently investigating these alleged acts of collusion.
The private sector only constitutes a free market when there are multiple players in the industry. An industry dominated by one or two entities (as the CA wholesale electricity market is) can not operate as a free market. In those situations a deregulated market is simply less free than a regulated market. A fact that right wing ideolouges (such as the CA GOP that created this fiasco) who don't understand the term "free market" choose to ignore.
If PG&E didn't have four billion over paid people they would be ok. If they had to run their company like all other companies and pay attention to customers and payroll they would be ok.<p>
Diablo canyon is at 20% Why? High Tides and shutdowns due to maintance.... hmmm.. sounds like a scam to cause a shortage so they can raise prices...
We also know that Americans continue to grow obese at an alarming rate, and that sedentary individuals such as computer operators and programmers are particularly prone to gaining unwanted weight.
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The Power-Cycle(TM) features a real-time display that shows how much power you are delivering to your system. Like a mountain bike, it offers 24 gears, so you can optimize your pedaling rate to your computer's energy needs. Planning to start a floating-point intensive calculation that you will make your Pentium III consume an extra 20 watts? Just upshift to a higher gear so you get more current with each turn of the crank!
The Preposterous Power-Cycle(TM) even includes a built-in 100 kVA uninterruptible power supply that charges as you pedal, so that your computer won't run out of power and crash if you need to step away for a moment to use the restroom. Trust us, the Preposterous Corporation has thought of everything!
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*--Potato Not Included
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
Born and raised in CA, I've always been jealous of kids elsewhere in the US who could always look forward to a few random days off each year -- snow days. The potential for blackouts makes me feel like a kid again! I cross my fingers when they begin, and hope I'll get to go home and play in the rain!
No luck yet...
J
Who moderates the meta-moderators?
"Socialist" power from LA is only above water because they've been charging the rest of the state extortionate rates for electricity. This, too, was forgotten in Gray Davis' little tirade against out-of-state power generators, who, for the record, have actually bailed out California's ass. Davis, like a lot of Californians and all New Yorkers, thinks the world spins on an axis centered on his city. He is wrong.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Homepage of a TV-Show about environmental Topics with tons of information about conserving energy in houses
Im sorry that those links are for completly German pages, but just email the operators of those pages and they should be able to supply you with lots of english resources.
Isn't the Iron Ring(tm) a Canadian thing? Do any of y'all 'mericuns know what our friend is talking about? (BigBlockMopar is obviously Canadian - ref to Ottawa ice storm below).
ARA, for those of you who have no idea what the fsck our friend is talking about:
Engineers in Canada (at least) get a small iron ring when they graduate. This ring is (ostensibly) made with metal from that bridge (in New York state, I think? Is there some national chauvinist subtext here?) that went bonkers and collapsed dramatically (whilst being filmed, no less). The father of a friend of mine -- an old NASA hand -- has an amusing story about convincing a cadre of American engineers that their Canadian co-workers were all gay because of that special little ring they wear -- as if the ring was a species of homosexuality-semiotic, like wearing rainbow colours or something...
- undoware.ca
I find the idea of the government telling people "no, only licensed contractors can own a vehicle of that type" to be repulsively intrusive. Does this mean putting up with a lot of idiot SUV drivers? Yup. Also, a few people actually use SUVs as what they're meant for -- sport/utility vehicles. Do you want these people to either be out in the cold or be required to show paperwork demonstrating that they really do need to tow their boat up a mountain on occasion?
Or would you make recreational boating illegal too?
I'm willing to give up my house not for the fat idiot SUV driver, but rather so I have the right to be a fat idiot SUV driver myself should I so wish.
I was speaking about the environment cost of global warming, where islands disappear under the sea, climate change and becomes more violent. The price for all this - and it is huge - isn't paid by anyone.
Basically all oil company/coal company/gas users are making money out of something that is given free (non-polluted air), but which has a price. When/if your house get taken over by flooding caused by global warming, will you be able to turn the people who make money out of gas for damages ? I doubt it...
I guess that the tens of thousands of us who drove the older Volkswagens with the batteries under the back seat were just lucky.
Hindenbergenwagen?
I was not stating that Nuclear power was the answer, just that it was AN answer, and probably better than any of those you listed. Did you know, that using conventional wind power arrays, over 1/2 OF THE ENTIRE UNITED STATES would have to be covered to produce enough power?
The word Nuclear brings up too many negative feelings in most people. These feelings HAVE KILLED VIRTUALLY ALL WORTH-WHILE RESEARCH IN FUSION IN THE UNITED STATES. There are some researchers in Canada, and France working on stuff that may make a fully functional fusion power plant possible in the next 20 years(there are some US researchers working on this also, but not as many as Canada and France have looking at it). I doubt there will ever be one constructed in CA.
Enviromentalists are generally so full of it, that they can't see their left shoe from their right. Take Hydro-Electric power. Yes, this was once praised by enviromentalists, till it caused the NEAR EXTINCTION OF SEVERAL TYPES OF FISH. Do you favor the complete distruction of an ecosystem for a few KW of power? There are several promising avenues of power research going on right now, including Orbiting solar arrays, and nuclear fusion. But DESTROYING THE LAND is not the way to go.
Admittanly, there are a few good places where geothermal, wind, and solar power could work. But the true keys here are: superconducter research, nuclear research, orbital research, and conservation research.
------ 24.5% slashdot pure
This law will never pass in California without a loophole for historical or vintage cars. There are WAY too many vintage car nuts out here. My home town has 3 car shows every summer.
Pretty much any car made after 1980 shouldn't be included in the loophole though. Anyone who wants to restore a car made after 1980 ought to have their head examined, because they're all crap (not IMO - it's just a fact). (except maybe Mazda RX-7, or any Porsche).
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
oh yeah, and rust is mainly a problem in the snow belt because of the unnecessary practice of salting roads.
Sand? Cinders?
Salt kills plants and trees, it's non-renewable, it essentially DOUBLES the cost of car ownership for people living in areas where roads are salted (cars last on average half to a third as long as they would otherwise for a given climate). There are alternatives that are safer, cheaper, and more environmentally sound, but the politicians are too wrapped up. It was actually an argument FOR salt to say that it increased economic activity by dissolving people's cars, and giving detroit auto workers jobs.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Actually, I think taxing gas is the best, most efficient and democratic way. So anyone can still drive an SUV, but you'd rather have a real need for it or load of cash to use one on a daily basis. As for people who need a pickup twice a year, they can always rent one (much more efficient than buying one and using it 363 days/year to commute). Gas tax is about equal to pollution tax : you pollute => you pay for the damages you cause to everyone.
Problem is, in the US gas tax is very low, which in turn let people waste gas for silly things (showing off with your new F150, leaving the engine on for 30 minutes, moving stuff in trucks instead of electric railways, etc.).
Moderation Totals:Flamebait=7, Insightful=6, Interesting=4, Overrated=1, Total=18.
But the liberal responses to your post have not received any negative moderations.
The moderation system is nothing more than an alternative method for people to express their views, and that's all people are doing with it.
When people see something with which they disagree, they mod it down. And because most of the young'ns who populate Slashdot don't have the life experience to grow out of their state school indoctrination, they take it out on conservatives.
--
I said not a large explosion. Because liquid sodium is such a great conductor, so very little of it is needed. Since liquid sodium is much less corrosive to metal, you can have more complicated valve structures to automatically cut off flow under whatever conditions you like, and you can make them smaller so they can be closer to the reactor, allowing them to cut off flow very quickly. Sure, there would be a small sodium explosion, but just as an M-80 will not set off a nuclear bomb (though possibly destroy a toilet) the explosion will not have a significant effect on the ability to rapidly cool the reaction with water.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
NO! The reason for the trouble is that there was no "deregulation." It was only a *CHANGE* of the very thick regulations. And a stupid change at that! It should be called "reregulation."
Those environmental laws that have been around for 10 or 20 years have clearly limited the regular introduction of new power generation facilities, contributing to the shortage.
Reregulation has put the CA power market into a situation where consumer have no reason to limit use, because their prices can't be raised. Wholesale power producers have the region in a bind because of the limited ability to import power into the region.
Reregulation dictates by law, that municipal power companies MUST buy their power in the "spot" market, where prices can soar based on temporary supply glitches and demand spikes.
It really IS the reregulation that screwed you in CA. But had actual "DEREGULATION" occurred, an actual free market price structure would allow consumer electric pricing to go up with the increased demand or decreases supply, thereby
causing consumers to CONSERVE. ( And probably causing a media news blitz with CAers crying their eyes out because their electricity costs $.30 per Kwh.)
Had actual deregulation occurred, your local power company could have purchased contracts for large amounts of power, and limited their own exposure to temporary market glitches.
Who owns the wires? Your local power company of course. That is enforced by law, and regulation. If your power goes out, and your neighbor sets up a big old solar panel farm, that's real nice, but he will need to either use that power himself,
or sell it back to your local power company. Men will come with guns, to disconnect that wire, if your neighbor tries to sell that power directly to you. Thank your precious regulations.
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety"-B.Franklin
Yes, I can agree with that.
I mistook you for someone else in another thread, who was claiming that inefficient vehicles should be confiscated and destroyed.
I still disagree with your implication that every American (or anyone else, for that matter) shouldn't have "a constitutional right to drive a huge inefficient SUV" -- but if that was simply rhetoric, I'll back off.
"And natural gas is drying up? How come I haven't seen headlines to that effect? It would be a news item a lot more significant than California's energy shortages."
I'll chime in on that. Remember 18 - 36 months ago when gas was dirt cheap? Outside of Indianapolis I could get gas for $0.89/gal. Both oil and natural gas prices at the wholesale level were at rediculous lows. So the brilliant oil company folks completely stopped looking for new reserves because it wasn't cost effective to hunt down such a cheap product. The natural gas they should have been looking for two years ago is the natural gas that's not in the pipelines today. Low supply, same high demand...high prices. It's standard boom and bust economics, and it's biting the CA utilities right in the ass.
It's not that the planet is out of natural gas, we just don't have much available right now.
-B
You can check out the current CA system load here. Oops, sorry about that, try here.
(yet another response) -
It's also a PROVEN FACT (wish I had a link) that a person who owns a car that is 30 years old is saving energy; instead of buying a new car every 2 to 5 years, keeping the old car running keeps the auto industry from building a new car, and all the energy consumption and pollution that entails.
nuff said - crushing the old cars would be a STUPID law. I know a person (www.kgcna.org) who owns a 1958 VW Karmann Ghia, that, though the car is exempt from emissions, has no catalytic converter, no fuel injection, mechanical ignition system, STILL passes modern California emissions.
It's not OLD cars that cause pollution, it's OLD cars that are not properly maintained (-er, and the huge oversized monster fucking gas guzzling drag racing muscle cars from the 1970's).
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I once worked in a microwavable french-fry factory, it doesn't mean I know fuck-all about the economics of microwaved french frys. Likewise, it's clear that you are completely ignorant of the economics of cleaner coal power. The reality is that, driven by Clean Air Act regulations, Scrubber technology has caused the cost per watt of much cleaner coal power to drop dramatically. If we keep the heat on this technology (and its costs)it will continue to improve. Anyone who thinks the industry would have had the initiative to discover cleaner coal power for less added cost without being forced by regulation is a naive fool. This kind of knee-jerk reaction is very typical of conservative dogma. The idea that the Clean Air Act is responsible for the power crisis in Californias is ludicrous. The situation is much more complicated than that. One issue that seems to be completely ignored by most posters is that this is all also part of the fall-out of the current squeeze by OPEC. Developing alternative power schemes is about more than cleaning up the environment. It's also about getting to a point where a group of robber barons an ocean away can't fuck our economy and energy stability through price-fixing. While these unfortunate and deluded tools of industry muddy the waters with right-wing rhetoric about the impossibility of cleaner power, countries like Denmark are simply making it happen by recognizing that pollution and fossil fuel dependence have real costs, and that when you start to consider those costs, things like wind and solar make a lot more sense. By the way, "Jodster," as EPA statistics demonstrated very forcefully a few years ago, one of the costs of dirty air is a significant increase in mortality due to respiratory ailments, particularly among the elderly and the old. You make a nice image of us dumb-ass environmentalists sittin' on the porch but I have a hard time shaking the image of a child coughing themselves to death in sunny California. But God forbid we keep a power baron from making the payments on their summer house in Italy. Roger W. Sant: Energy Baron: net worth 2.2 Billion Dennis Bakke: Energy Baron: net worth 2 Billion Robert C. McNair: Energy Baron: net worth 1.4 Billion cough, cough, cough.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
That's why we have tort law. If I trash your back yard, you can sue me. Simple as that. So stop complaining, and (if folks are really f*cking up your land) start suing.
Dude.. you are a total idiot, Cali is getting hammered with storms right now, getting some snow.. While all of Texas is seeing 30 degree weather. You think our electricity is cheap? We are getting our wallets stolen from us by HL&P and San Banard... My family's electric bill was 348 for the month of December.
Our house is a double wide trailer house, we have 2 HVAC units which we hardly ever run. The only things that run around here are 2 tvs, 2 computers maybe 3 to 6 lamps and the washer and dryer and the dishwasher (only once a day). We dont use all that much power except at night. We dont know where all that bill is coming from.
My boss never has a bill over 150 bucks, and he runs everything all the time, with a wife and 2 little children. That sorta bothers me since he has 2 big screen tvs, and runs the HVAC all the time (he is 23 and doesnt understand you dont set it to 90 then get hot and set it to 60 and then restart the cycle again, unfortunately he does it at work too, standard clothing is short sleeves and a removable coat at work)
The rate hike is all across the board, they didnt hike it up just cuz cali is having power problems. The rate has been high since the summer.
But I still find it strange how power is done stock exchanges. Why not just hook all the generators up, count the megawatts that you produce.. then count the megawatts your customers use.. if you have a deficit, you pay the main controller, if you have extra, you get paid by the main controller. (main controller just being a name thrown out.. maybe DOE would be better word)
But who cares what i think.. im not in that job sector. so i wouldnt know..
(capitalization is optional, please use mental spell check)
Consider yourself blessed if you are sneezed on by a dragon and only get wet, it could have been a fireball.
I know, I know, you don't believe me. You think it's "satire". You think it's "all a big joke". You think it's "just some peurile wanna-be irony maven looking for quick hits on his website". So help me, nothing would give me more pleasure. Nothing would make me happier. I want more than any of you to believe that it's wrong!why would a woman like Ayn Rand -- a successful author and a happy wife, a philosopher and intellectual of the first order, and a fiercely devoted critic of the existing social order -- have her head severed unless there was some awful calamity approaching that she could see, but we ignored?
Carousel is a lie!
Who is John Galt?
"Can anyone out thattaway comment on the power situation as it affects you? " - No. My power will be out when it affects me.
In the linked article:
UPDATE: The California Independent System Operator has downgraded Thursday's Stage Three power emergency to a Stage Two emergency, ending the threat of rolling blackouts across the Bay Area.
Cal ISO spokesman Patrick Dorinson said that the combination of conservation and added power buys during the day has enabled the ISO, which oversees California's power grid, to avoid proceeding from a Stage Three Electrical Emergency issued at 9:30 a.m. today to the more drastic step of a rolling blackout order.
--
Given the amount of cash san francisco has available, and this rolling blackout thing, people are going to be looking for alternatives so they can at least run their computers. Great time to be a solar power solution supplier.
As quoted from the site: UPDATE: The California Independent System Operator has downgraded Thursday's Stage Three power emergency to a Stage Two emergency, ending the threat of rolling blackouts across the Bay Area.
Sorry, but I can't condemn environmentalists for caring about this sort of thing. And those who do are ignorant, programmed, and/or just plain evil.
In any case, anybody who thinks that alternative energy methods were really given a fair shake, and were not tampered with by oil interests. . . It's called P.R., folks. --aka, Propaganda. Try not to fall for it so easily. It's embarrassing to watch supposedly smart people suck it up so easily.
Go watch "Tucker" if you want a clue on how these things work. Lucas back then was more or less uninfected by Hollywood B.S., so the film is a pretty reliable picture of just how vicious big money interests will get.
-Fantastic Lad.
The politicians are trying to blame the free market to cover for their own problems. They forcibly separated generation from distribution, de-regulated pricing on the supply side, enacted regulation that made it virtually impossible to build new capacity, and maintained strict control over retail rates. A recipe for disaster.
Look at what has happened to natural gas in the Midwest. My gas bill was over $400 this month because the price has quadrupled. But I don't have to worry about running out of gas. Supply and demand balances everything out. If gas rates were frozen at old low levels, no one would conserve - voluntarily - and we'd have rolling service interruptions too.
Put the blame 100% on the California legislature for passing this botchwork law.
...everyone's brand-new UPSs storing up their charge. =)
Who moderates the meta-moderators?
Not to mention the fact that the tech sector has exploded in California. You can't tell me that all those servers out there aren't sucking up power like there's no tomorrow. And top that off with the fact that no new plants are being built, who couldn't see disaster coming?
take off the fuzzy slippers to mail me.....
In the words of Homer Simpson... "Mmmmm... beer."
In the words of Homer Simpson... "Mmmmm... beer."
Menlo Park, Palo Alto and Stanford remain unaffected as yet. Nothing the matter as far as I can tell. Vaporware news.
------
sigs are a total waste of bandwith, especially when the signal-to-noise ratio is lower than 1:10.
What amuses me is that we really don't have a power production problem in most areas of the country---rather we have a transport problem.
I'm from North Dakota a state with a population of 642,000 (we're like a nice, small city but with a really low population density) and a power production capacity well beyond its needs. The power companies within North Dakota already sell the bulk of their production to buyers outside of the state. Right now, we're selling all we can but there's still untapped generating capacity. Why? The infastructure isn't capable of exporting that much wattage. It's kinda' like hooking a garden hose to a fire hydrant---you'll get water out of it, but not nearly as much compared to using a fire hose.
----
----
Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
The "situation" was fixed by an emergency purchase of some large number of megawatts from out of state.
Here's an article from the local rag. It'll be interesting to see what happens next time. I'd love the city to go dark, even if it meant a spendy cab ride (I normally take the local LRT home.)
Nice bonus: paranoia at work lead to all of the development servers being shut down. Counter-Strike all afternoon!
jfb
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
It should be important to note that the head of the DWP of L.A. (or L.A. Power as it has been put) was not subject to the same laws as other, private, utilities. Although legislation in California forced private utlities to sell off some of the power plants they owned and drove a large stake between generation and distribution in the market, municipal power companies were not subject to the same regulations. The DWP has been used as an example in this case, so let's go with that. The DWP owns enough of its own generators to not be dependent upon the rest of the power grid for the power that it distributes to its customers in L.A. The only reason that they still own enough generators to be able to do this and to sell some of the excess back into the grid is because they were not forced to deregulate. To praise the head of the DWP as being somehow more insightful than others is a mistake. His insight or tuition is nothing of the sort, rather it is a break of good luck.
There also seems to be some blurring between the processes and companies involved in generation and distribution. The companies that deliver power to you in California, except if you live in a place serviced by a municipal power company, are no longer the companies that are primary generators of that electricity. When legislation for deregulation was passed, it forced private power companies to divest a certain amount of generators. Several companies, Southern Calfornia Edison included, sold generators at very high prices, hoping that the monies made from the sales would be enough to float them until the rate freeze would be over. They made a gamble and lost. The reserve cash has turned out to not be enough to keep the utility clear of debt and the rate freeze is still far from over.
The true problem with deregulation is that in an attempt to eliminate a captive market and allow users to choose whom they buy their power from, the State has instead built a brick wall of debt around the captive market. With the generators unrestricted in the dollar amount they can sell their electricty (and they are selling it significantly over cost. Most companies owning generators are averaging a 150% profit increase from last year) for, the utilities that deliver the power have been forced to bite the bullet. As a result of rate freezes, the utilities are unable to pass costs along to consumers, thereby digging themselves deeper and deeper into debt. Just last week the crippled state of the utilities credit was made evident by the down-grading of Southern California Edison's credit rating to junk bond status. Pacific Gas and Electric is likely to follow soon.
The only reason that the generators are capable of selling at such high prices is due to the slow down in the building of power plants (due to a number of factors discussed throughout this thread) and to the shut down of current plants as they are retooled to meet environmental standards. The combination of all these elements has lead to this runaway market.
nope - still stand by what I said. Those cars are all crap.
Except the 5.0 Mustang, whose memory is now totally tainted by the turd they stamp the Mustang badge on today.
You said it best, the Fiero is an economy car. It WOULD have been cool if it wasn't a cheap piece of plastic junk. How does one restore a Fiero anyway? You can pound out dents and weld in replacement panels in sheet metal. Fieros will just dust away once all the OEM plastic panels dry up.
And as far as the grand national goes, that 3.8l Buick engine was one of the least reliable engines GM ever produced. Also one of the most used. Wonder why GM (Chevy/Buick/Olds) is no longer #1? I blame that engine.
In 30 years, when I see someone park a fully-restored Aztec at a classic car show, I will laugh my ass off - it's a worthless piece of crap now, and 30 years does not make a car a classic.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Are you an expert on reactors, or just going by what others tell you?
I was a reactor operator for 10 years and while I'll agree nuke plants are a lot safer than most people think, I feel the need to point out that it's not quite as straightforward as you make it out to be.
Sure, when the water boils off you lose your moderator which stops the reaction -- but you also lose your cooling. And reactors (ALL fission reactors) continue to generate a significant amount of heat well after the reaction 'stops'. This is *exactly* what happened at TMI -- their reactor was fully shut down well before the damage occurred. The damage occurred because a steam bubble was formed in the reactor vessel, and steam doesn't cool as well as water.
As for Chernobyl -- stupid plant design, and stupid operators (they weren't following proper procedure during refueling and testing operations).
One thing I *specifically* remember about our review of the Chernobyl incident was a mention of the fact that some Canadian plants share certain design characteristics with the Chernobyl plant. Care to comment on that? I don't have any info handy on the design(s) of your plants, so I don't know which plants it would be (and I don't recall any of our info ever referring to a "CanDo" plant, so we must have called them something else).
Ohh, and earthquakes. Earthquakes are bad.
I'll agree that California does leech off the surrounding states and such though. How 'bout water? Heck, they snag water from the watershed of states as far away as Colorado.
CA's golf courses are nice and green though.
--CP
Agreed. Our pontificating poster has managed to cover up the real issue with his partisan rhetoric, and I think the real issue *IS* deregulation. It just seems like such a MASSIVE coincidence that almost a year to the day after we all deregulated power that suddenly there's "energy shortages" and such. Up here in Oregon, we're having them too, and power companies are "passing along rate hikes to the consumer" because they can't seem to make enough money. In fact, a local power provider is helping the public find "low-energy" alternatives to regular light-bulbs and so-forth, but we all know people do begin to take steps to reduce their power consumption, the power companies will start complaining that no-one is using enough power, and they're not making enough money, so there'll be a rate-hike anyways.
Don't blame Republicans or Democrats for this. Assigning blame, and pretending that one side is at fault, and that the other is a shining paragon of virtue is not only to miss the point entirely, but to expose your own biases and place yourself among that which is known as "uninformed rabble" who latch onto one dogma or another and slavishly belive everything they're told.
---
"Cut word lines. Cut music lines. Smash the control images. Smash the control machine." - William S. Burroughs
as far as i know suvs were probably not of us origin. ;))
i don't really know a whole lot about suv history but land rover is english based.
it seems to me that they pioneered the 'suv' although not exactly with the features most soccer moms enjoy today.
to the best of my knowledge, 'suv' was coined by toyota.
and about any place to use the sports cars, i don't think the autobahn is on the northern our southern continents of america, much less anything remotely resembling it.
in regards to 'americans' that don't walk, etc., don't make categorical statements like that.
there are many people here who walk and/or are fitness minded. so please, shut up.
the point of my post was to stop the anti-us flaming.
it's really not necessary for something like slashdot which is supposed to be a home for (slightly) intelligent discussion as well as news (for nerds, as opposed to nutritionists
-=[ http://www.legos.org ]=-
"You want power? Then you have to get dirty *just* *like* *everyone* *else*. TANSTAAFL, you know?"
sorry but you seem to be misinformed. clean nuclear energy technology has been in our back pockets for over 10 years. it was of course buried by your friendly republicans (pawns of the oil industry) in congress who were unwittingly helped along by misinformed environmentalists. "Integral Fast Reactor", look it up.
also natural gas supplies are not drying up. again this is just plain incorrect as are several other points you've tried to make.
you've made some good points but trying to lay the blame all on the Democrats and trying to demonize things by applying the evil "liberal" label to them negates your objectivity.
The problem is in the laws. Laws were passed to force a market to do something unnatural, like building expensive power plants instead of being able to buy cheap power from outside of the region, under long term contracts.
The problem is in the laws. The "regulations." Actual deregulation is a good idea. Writing a bunch of new laws and calling them "deregulation" can never be the answer.
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety"-B.Franklin
don't you mean "thanks to their shiny new decentralized freemarket system"
Let's see...
- Government mandates that PG&E sell off their generating capacaty.
- Government creates a bureau that buys and sells electricity.
- Government mandates that they sell electricity at a fixed price.
- Government mandates that they buy electricity at whatever the generating companies ask.
- Government puts the cut-off switch in the hands of said bureau.
Sounds like central planning to me.
"A free market is a great idea. We should try it some time."
Sounds like central planning to me.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I lvive in Silicon Valley and we've been at stage 3 alert for months.
All the dire conclusions as to why though are by and large nonsense. The priamry reasons are two fold:
(1) Its been a cold winter and northern california uses a LOT of electric heat (very inefficient).
(2) Our winter month power needs are met in a large part by power bought from Washington. Its been hellishly cold in Washington this year and they haven't had much to sell us.
The whole "we're goign broke" thing is a seperate issue raised by the power utilities (as much as they'd like to tie them together) and its not 100% clear its even true.
Yes the prodcuers have raised prices way up BUT many of the smot major producers are owned by the same holding companies as the utilities. So while their utilities are losing money, their power plants are raking it in. The ACTUAL amount of money being made or lost is pretty much hidden.
I think people around here are starting to wise up and understand the total lack of danger in nuclear plants
:-(
Yeah, Tschernobyl and now Temellin show that nuclear are realy safe.
What about solar power plants? I thought that california has a very high sun/good weather rate, so the plants should be running effecient. Building such plants will probably also be a good investion for your local hightech economy (Silicon Valley).
- Yasa
Free tip for CA denizens: The Plan to steal your cars from you via smog regs is already well underway. Start fighting it now. Basically it combines (1) smog check rules DESIGNED TO FAIL A PERCENTAGE of cars (with an eventual goal of 97% of all cars over 10 years old) with (2) rules that make it ILLEGAL to keep an unregistered vechicle on your property. (1) + (2) = State power to STEAL YOUR CARS and crush them into cubes. See http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/1223/sb42/smo gflyer_5.html for more details.
Yeah, and they're gonna take your guns away, too.
He didn't get impeached because he got a blowjob in the Oval Office. He got impeached because he lied under oath, encouraged subordinates do the same thing, and obstructed justice among other things. Go re-read Starr's report and this time skip to the last section where he outlined the laws broken. Thank you for reinforcing my opinion that all leftists are sex-obsessed idiots.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Contrary to what those in other sections of the world may think (what? you don't keep up with everything that happens in California? why not?), this is not exactly a new topic.
It comes down to, essentially, a truly awful economic decision and a great deal of FUD spread by (who else?) the power companies and the media.
Deregulation started in 1995, when the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) in San Francisco started studying the possibility. Other states (most notably New Jersey/Delaware/Pennsylvania/Maryland, which forms one power region) had managed to successfully deregulate power, so California figured it was a Good Thing (TM).
The bad economics come in when you realize that it was only the wholesale market that was deregulated, but that Southern California Edison (SCE) and Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) were under a CPUC-imposed rate freeze, which meant they could not raise their rates.
Added to this was a requirement that Edison, at least (I'm not sure about PG&E), was forced to divest itself of its power plants. These power plants were bought up by companies that were essentially startups. The new generators of electricity raised the price of electricity, and SCE and PG&E were stuck.
It amounts to a larger version of the rent control in my hometown of Santa Monica - costs may rise but the end-users pay a fixed rate set by the government.
An interesting side note for those who care to research further - San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) was under no such rate freeze, and prices, predictably, tripled this summer. SDG&E, you notice, is not facing bankruptcy, because they are free to raise their rates.
As for the environmental "cartel" whining about nuclear power, it was my last knowledge that both Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant north of San Luis Obispo and San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS, aka "the iron tits" due to their unfortunate shape) were both running (with some exceptions due to kelp in the intake at DCNPP).
The cities of Los Angeles, Pasadena, Glendale, Riverside, and San Bernadino (among others) are NOT affected, no matter what FUD you may see in the national media, because they have municipal utilities which have long-term contracts and were never regulated (the CPUC has no authority over municipal utilities).
You can check the status of the grid at the California Independent System Operator's website, but it may be down (slashdotted without ever being posted on slashdot, imagine!) We have had no rotating outages yet. Let's hope the broken system gets fixed soon.
Zaphod B
When duplication is outlawed, only outlaws will have
we never shot uranium core bulletts.
You've got to be kidding. It's been widely known that the US and other countries use depleted uranium rounds for years. Their extra mass helps make them good anti-tank rounds for the A-10, for example.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
The point is, when you drive your car, you damage *my* air supply, *my* environment etc.. So you're infringing *my* property rights. I [should] have a right to stop you doing that, or at least a say.
Yes, and when you're buying a product that *I* want, you are increasing the demand for the product that *I* want, which causes the manufacturer to become more smug and increase the price on a product that *I* WANTED TO BE CHEAPER!
It's the regulations that are screwing you in CA.
>The real problem here is that the utilities aren't allowed to roll blackouts unless there is absolutely no power to be bought on the free market at any price. The power producers know this and can inflate their
A Law that mandates that your local power company buys power, regardless of price. If you were selling what would you do?
Stop calling it "DEregulation!". Call it what it was "REregulation."
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety"-B.Franklin
Diablo Canyon is in "my backyard".
I have taken the tour. The building is most impressive. Nothing is going to break or collapse, even in a very strong quake. Then my wife took a geology course at the local community college. The one fault that caused the controversey isn't the only local fault. There are several others. Most of them minor. We're a fairly geolocially stable region here, (compared to the rest of California).
Anyway, the plant is going to be shut down in something like 2012. That's a buttload of money to spend on a plant that only operates for like 20 years. Couldn't they have found someplace else?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Are YOU an idiot? /. you are not doing all you can do for the environment. If you can't handle a little comment you should turn off your little computer and go hide in the woods, because the energy you use by using your computer contibutes to the "poison gas" produce by electrical plants.
Seriously
My reference to the third world was to the articles comment. Obviously, if you are reading
PS I have read Ayn Rand and her advise to you would be to stop wasting electricity on your holier than thou comments and take action!
Censorship rests on the child's delusion that "If I shut my eyes so I can't see it, it isn't there".
'big cars' and stuff larger than we need huh?
who makes bmws, mercedes, porsche, audi, ferarri, lamborghini, etc...?
is that the u.s.?
no i didn't think so..
shut up and stop flaming about the excess of u.s. citizens.
i'm sure there are no big cars or houses or *gasp* WASTE in ANY OTHER COUNTRY, much less a EUROPEAN COUNTRY.
if you have such a problem with 'americans' and 'american waste' (america does encompass more than the united states last time i checked) then go post your u.s.-hating comments to a non-'american'-operated(based/focused?) website.
-=[ http://www.legos.org ]=-
To all California economic fundamentalists: I certainly hope you will join me in opposing any government intervention in California. Although it sure APPEARS that energy deregulation has been a massive, colossal failure, you should have no doubt that deregulation will be proven right. After all, several economists support deregulation, and we know that economics is truth itself.
YES it's true that Intel and other major companies are suspending new construction until California fixes their shortage.
YES it's true that the states and countries with nationalized energy are doing way better than deregulated California.
YES we should use business-type performance measures and evaluate policies based on outcomes... just NOT when we are measuring conservative policies
YES it's true that there are no power plants because there was no one producer responsible for meeting demand.
But these are NO reasons to quit now. After all, the LAWS of supply and demand are unimpeachable. The fact that demand has gone way up and prices have skyrocketed instead of demand increasing is NO reason to doubt economic LAWS, patriots. We must see this experiment through to its conclusion. Obviously we haven't waited long enough. If it takes 5 years or 25 years by God, we should wait until we're proven right.
Imagine forcing out-of-state producers to sell power to California just to prevent blackouts. Whatever happened to self reliance and good old-fashioned American know-how? For those weak-minded conservatives who are now screaming to the nanny state to intervene, I suggest practicing a little of the self-reliance you preach. Do you know have a Coleman stove patriot? Do you not have a two year supply of batteries and MRE's?? I will post several links to various militia and Amish web sites. Learn to live off the land, patriots!
Every morning I get on my knees and thank God I don't live in SLAVERY in socialist China... or Canada.. or Oregon. You should too.
-- Proud and Free by Candle in CA
that sounds like the libertarian arugment. Which is funny, because if everyone else was driving a polluting car, and it was causing me problems, I think I could set aside something like a few thousand dollars to pay a lawyer to sue everyone(?!) and then what - I'd have to PROVE in a court of law (without the aid of government-funded studies) that my air supply is damaged - that my health is endangered. . . yeah, right.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Haha.. We are saving power. But you know what?
When in the last 10 years the population has doubled and the number of power plants has remained the same, there isn't a thing you can do. They can't just shut off the infrustructure that exists to allow people to live (like traffic lights and such) to help save electricity. It just doesn't work. When your population doubles, so should your power output.
The flaw in this analogy is obvious. Electrical energy is a resource that can be produced in practically limitless amounts, given the right technology.
No, it isn't. If it's practically limitless, why are the rolling blackouts in California an issue?
However you make electricity, you still make noxious waste, whether it be spent radioactive fuel rods, or dead fish from the hydroelectric dam, or greenhouse gases from a fossil fuel plant.
A photovoltaic cell (solar) requires more energy to manufacture than it will produce over its entire life.
The silver bullet that will eradicate all of the problems with electrical consumption (harnessed fusion) is even further off than zero emissions cars.
So, your thinking and your understanding of the world is flawed. You don't think about where the electricity comes from.
Therefore, if you can have such luxuries as you >17" monitor, I'll have my 1974 model car.
Clean air isn't something we can create (at least, not yet) - it is by definition a lack of pollutants. Therefore, the best way to make more energy is to generate more, the best way to make more clean air is to pollute less.Of course! It's so easy to do! I'm a good person, I can run my big and inefficient 17" monitor because they can always generate more power, even though that power is derived from [insert ecological threat here]!
You make no sense.
What you're basically telling me is that *you* can have *your* inefficient big monitor, and *I* can't have my allegedly inefficient old car?
Of course, energy conservation is important, too; a ban on old refrigerators might be a good idea, it's just not practical to enforce.Sure! I have a 1956 QuikFrez. Nice fridge, though it can't keep ice cream worth a damn.
Where'd I get it? When I first moved out on my own, I was driving past an appliance shop and I spotted it sitting by the scrap metal bins. I managed to get it into the back of my old Chevette and tied it into place. Bringing it home, I found that the compressor was bad.
I shrugged my shoulders, drained the freon (a friend of mine bought it off me), and pulled the fridge to pieces. New insulation. New magnetic door seal gasket, custom made for me. New paint job, Honda's white paint. New thermostat. New compressor, with R134a (ozone safe) freon.
Now, are you going to take that away from me because it's an old fridge? Because it really isn't. It's a new fridge that happens to be in an old cabinet.
Cars, on the other hand, have to be individually licensed, so inspecting them for emissions is more than practical.Electric bills have to be paid individually, so going into peoples' houses to look for energy-wasting old fridges and 17" monitors is more than practical. Maybe they can save us a whole lot of trouble and look for subversive materials while they're there, you know, like the copy of Socialist Worker that you keep on your coffee table?
I find the hatred for environmental legislation that some people exhibit to be profoundly disturbing.I find the willingness to give up your basic rights to privacy, possession and maintenance of those things that you've bought or built to be frightening.
Of course I'm pro-capitalist and pro-industrySure you are.
but people's health and quality of life have to be maintained.Think about it this way:
If my old fridge were so inefficient, how many years would it take for a new fridge to pay for itself with the electrical savings? My electric bill gives me a vested interest in making sure that my appliances are efficient. (Why do you think I spent over $300 for a *good* compressor for that fridge and then hours cutting appliance-grade styrofoam to shape to fit into its curved top? I could have repaired the old one and left the original fiberglass insulation in there.)
If you want to splurge with a 17" monitor, I'll splurge with my old car.
This doesn't mean a ban on industry, just the diversion of some resources into minimizing the impact on the air and water.Too often, these things are unrealistic or just simply stupidly planned.
For example, if you're running a power plant that's been operational for 30 years, because the power plant is old, it doesn't have to meet modern emissions standards. It would be rather unfair to have to make the owner spend $10 million for an unforseen upgrade.
Now, if you're considering replacing that power plant because you want something that's going to give you more power for every ton of coal that you burn, and yet you have to spend $10 million in pollution controls that your old plant didn't have to have, how long will it take you to recoup that $10 million in additional energy efficiency? Probably longer than your shareholders want.
So, if there were no rule, the upgrade would have happened, and the power plant would produce x more kWh of electricity for every ton of coal burned. More electricity produced from each ton of coal means that less coal is required to meet demand, and therefore less emissions occur.
However, because there was a rule, the power plant bumps along as it did, inefficient as before, because the cost of new pollution controls makes it impractical in any business sense, burning more coal than it needs to, and therefore producing more nasty by-products.
Before catalytic converters were added to cars, cars did have more emissions of unburnt gasoline (hydrocarbons) than they have now. But sulphur dioxide was absolutely unheard of in car exhaust.
So, all the tree huggers whined, and the EPA demanded that cataclysmic converters be added to cars. Gas mileage went down, because the engine has to push exhaust gases past this new restriction in the exhaust pipe. And while unpleasant smelling but relatively harmless HC was removed from the exhaust, the small amounts of sulphur in the fuel were catalyzed into sulphur dioxide, which promptly floats up into the clouds to combine with water and form acid rain.
Good job, environmentalists. See what happens when you don't ask a scientist before you start writing your Congressman?
Today, cataclysmic converters are de rigeur, despite their gas mileage (which means more emissions!) penalty and the sulphuric acid which falls from the sky and kills lakes and forests.
Here's what I'm saying: everyone has a vested interest in energy efficiency. Businesses, individuals, environmentalists. Restrictions and laws that are designed to help more often than not end up creating their own problems which impede the normal tendency of the marketplace to improve products and services.
However, anytime any government gets involved in anything, it gets screwed up. It's been proven time and time again. The places where the governments are most intrusive are also the poorest, dirtiest places on earth. Look at India as an example. I understand their parliament debated for months as to whether they should allow Coca-Cola to be sold there - all the while people are starving to death.
Car companies switched to electronic ignition from Kettering points back in the 1970s because the market demanded better drivability and gas mileage, and technology made the price reasonable. Likewise, modern fuel injection systems and overhead cams would have been adopted for market reasons, without government intervention. When gasoline is burned at its stoichiometric optimum of 14.7:1, it produces the most power with the least emissions. Power translates to engine efficiency and therefore gas mileage; emissions reductions go hand in hand with that.
It gets worse. It's arguable that the current SUV craze is based on government-legislated Corporate Average Fuel Economy laws. After all, the Feds told the car companies that all their carlines had to have an average fuel consumption. Over the years, this was increased and increased and increased. Cars like the Caprice Classic, Impala and Crown Victoria are being squeezed out.
And yet, the market shows that some people still want a big and heavy car. Ask an SUV owner why they like their SUV; weight is a recurring theme.
So, because trucks are exempt from CAFE rules, the car companies started to build big land yachts that are technically trucks. The SUV was born. 4x4 isn't even the prime motivator anymore. Look at how many Blazers, Durangos, Explorers - hell, even Jeeps, are 2WD.
The buyer wants a big, heavy car, but can't get one. So, instead, he buys the next best thing. He buys a station wagon with leather seats that has been built onto a truck frame. Sure, because of its huge frontal area and the excess weight of a frame that was designed for carrying around sheets of drywall, it consumes twice the gas of the Caprice Classic that he wanted. But since the Caprice is discontinued, he bought the next best thing.
Neat, huh?
I've heard that CAFE will soon start to be applied to a manufacturer's truck lines, too. I assure you, this will backfire, too. I don't know how, I can't predict it. But mark my words, and remember them ten years from now: I guarantee that somehow the market will again turn environmentalist rules against the environmentalists.
And since when did anyone have a "right" to drive? By democratic legislation, cars have always had to be roadworthy, safe, and operated by a governmentally licensed driver.When on the road, yes. However, your simple right to possession takes over when it's parked in your driveway. Possession is 9/10 of the law.
If you want to say that a car has to be registered as your possession while it's parked in your driveway and not being driven, I'd suggest that my next step is to ask when I have to register my other possessions, like my computer, my kitchen knives, my TV set, my telephone, etc. with the government authorities. After all, all of these devices either consume precious energy or can be used in subversive and dangerous ways.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I'd like to point out that these problems didn't appear when ecological protections were passed, only after deregulation. Can't have conservatives blaming their economic policies or (gasp!) admitting that they screwed up.
The only areas in California that weren't threatened with rolling blackouts or large rate increases were cities with municipal utilities. Strange how they came through unscathed, isn't it...
Aw, we love you too.
Just because our state has all of the hot girls in bikinis (we loan 'em to Hawaii occasionally) is no reason to get snippy.
Seriously, the energy commission that engineered deregulation was bought and paid for by the power companies, so they could sell off their old and decrepit power plants to new companies for cash. However, during all of the buying and selling, none of them really thought about having to provide power. Not that it really hurts them: they get to raise rates without having to generate any more electricity. All income, no expenses--now that's a business model!
The point is kind of moot however, because the rolling blackouts never happened (a massive rate hike is underway however).
---
I'm high on Elf Life!
Oper on the Nightstar
Don't forget that the ash is also radio active. Quite a bit of coal is radioactive but that would scare people 'cause only nuke plants are radio active. Ever take a giger counter to a banana? There are lots of radio active things in the real world.
I think its funny that the anti-nuke greenies that have stopped research in nuke plants are in for a dose of reality. That nice russian plant that went boom is going to be replaced by two new brand new 30 year old design unsafe plants. If the research had continued, the new plants could be the safest in the world.
They take up a bit of land, and are likely an eyesore. Then again, they are confined to the middle of the desert.
I got it! We cover the Sahara with these things and Africa produces power for the world!
apt-get install redhat please god - Me (take it easy, I love Debian)
I was living in New York during the hot summer a year or two ago when the city was having all kinds of power problems. Woke up one morning, went into the bathroom to do the business, and realized that the lights were only glowing at about 75% of their usual intensity. No way I was getting anywhere near 120VAC! Walked into the living room and was, er, englightened as I saw smoke billowing from the power station down the block and a small army of firefighters and big red trucks preparing to mount their offensive...
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
So you're saying it's impossible to generate electricity for the needs of people without seriously polluting the environment?
Hope you enjoy what you create.
Nice fucking web page, you bastard.
It's full of malicious javascript and porno -- can't you do something better with your time?
If there's anything I hate, it's stupid people. Like you.
there is no thing
what else could you want?
This is the easiest of all. You just put a well isolated and rather big tank in the middle of the house which stores warm water.
There are already a lot of those houses in Germany, they are called zero emission houses, guess why.
With today technology it is possible to build houses that are self contained where heat and cold is concerned, when you do it right you can even lower the need for further electricity down to a point that the house runs for days in a row without the need for external power.
The problem with this is of course is that it is a decentralized approach, each house needs that technology, hence each house builder needs to integrate it. For existing houses this is impossible of course.
As usual you should look how its done in France.
- 75% of produced power is nuclear.
- among the cheapest electricity in Europe.
- among the smallest CO2 emissions.
- same price wherever you live
- national electricity utility turns huge operating profits, owns many foreign utility companies.
- lots of power exported, so that's even more cash.
- rolling blackouts do not happen, there is not
even a word to translate it in French.
The rolling blackouts were planned to start at 4pm, but the blackouts were held off for a bit, and around 5:30 it was annouced that there will be no rolling outages. Thanks to slashdot for reporting the story about 4 hours late.
Why don't we get all the immigrants to ride stationary pedal bikes to generate the electricity needed to power the air conditioners so that us fat Americans can get the cooling we need because the extra layers of fat prevent our metabolism from expending the extra heat that is released when we digest all our fatty donuts and fajita's. Drinking tons of diet pop doesn't help cool me down, but it sure tastes good and the commercials even say that it will make me lose weight (it says diet on it!)
Let's try implementing things like solar, wind, geothermal, and tidal power on a large scale before we conclude nuclear fission is environmentally friendly.
Oh man, where do I start....
Ok... Wind... I live within sight of one of the largest windmill farms in California, Altamont Pass east of Livermore. I haven't seen the windmills spin in ernest since last fall. Sure, you see a few of the more advanced ones chugging along every now and then, when a storm provides a breeze, but nothing like what they do at say 2pm on any August afternoon. It's seasonal power, and you're lucky to get it more than 5 hours a day at that. We tried it, it's a nice topping source to run air conditioners, but not much more.
Solar... See my rant elsewhere in this thread. It's not economical at prices that will sustain the economy. You want solar?? Inflation baby... yea...
Geothermal... Nice big project up in Sonoma county, north of my house. Huge even... Sprawls over acres and acres of land... Put's out about 500MW I believe, which is nothing to sneeze at. They have trouble keeping the turbine blades on the shafts. The steam is corrosive, and maintenance costs are high. They drilled so much that the pressure started falling off, and now they have inject water, which costs $$. Now if California just had 30 more projects like it, we'd be set.... And maybe even under $0.20KWh... Maybe... I got to tour them once when I was a kid. The sulfur fumes made me sicker than hell.
Tidal... Yea.. Go ask the fish first. Then solve that little problem of building a viable plant, and covering the two 3 hour periods per day where your prime movers are idle due to lack of water current. Oh, and did I mention that you're not allowed to flood any wetlands, or disturb any marine habitats in the process? Get back to us when you've got it figured out!
Which brings us to nukes and conventional plants... Tried and true.. They work. Conventional plants spew huge volumes of carbon into the atmosphere, and might be causing problems. Nukes produce some pretty nasty waste, that can be stored in a reasonably small space, in a confined environment. When a nuke breaks down, some pretty spectacular and disasterous things can happen, but usually don't. People die. Yes they do. Two workers died just last year I believe, operating a nuke plant in Japan. Prime earthquake country I might add, just like California. Several dozen workers died at a rather notorious plant near Kiev a few years back, and several hundered thousand were injured due to an extremely poor reactor design that hasn't been built in the west in more than 35 years. But did you know that an average of ~55 people die EVERY DAY mining coal for conventional power plants? Nobody seems to care about that so much. Where's the outrage there? Add the coal ash waste, the mining accidents, and the atmospheric pollution together, and coal fired power plants probably kill more people per year than all the world's nuclear accidents total! So yea... I can reasonable conclude that nuclear power, as implemented in the US, Japan, and Europe is safe, and actually environmentally friendly, and the greenies have been duping us on this for years.
But there is one thing they are right about, and it's the only thing that will get California our of the mess it's currently in. That's conservation. It takes time to build powerplants, no matter what the fuel source. California needs power today... right now. To that end, I've spent about $120 replacing just about every single incandecant lightbulb in my house with a compact fluorecent bulb. I'm putting R30 isulation in my attic this weekend, and next week I'm having my (circa 1968) 55% AFUE furnace and 4 SEER A/C replaced with a 80% AFUE furnace and a 14 SEER A/C unit. For those Californians reading this... What are you doing to conserve power in your house?
Temkin
The other guy was agreeing with you! He was using sarcasm to make a point!
A silicon wafer making company outside my home town uses 40 MW. I highly doubt that photovoltaic produces more than 10 KW. Obviously solar cells can not work in industrial situations. They are good for calculators and spacecraft that use low power (ones that go too far from the sun can't use it: i.e. Cassini) but hardly cost effective or even feasible to implement on the large scale that would be required to power industry.
Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
In fact, we voted for the idea (it was a state ballot initiative, sponsored by, you guessed it, the power companies). Well, not we, because I'm a minor, so I can't vote. And even if I could vote, I would have voted against it. But the fact remains, Californians have themselves to blame for the fiasco, and I'm too weak to refrain from pointing out that I called it. Lessee, there's an oligopoly on power. Power is a necessity. Even my retarded Econ teacher would be able to tell you that that's an inelastic market, and that people will more or less pay whatever they have to. That means that the corporations (Hey! Guess what? They're int he business of making money!) will do whatever they feel like if they think it'll make them some bucks. They're not nice guys. They're businessmen. They really couldn't care less if your Linux box was about to break the record for uptime. They want some money, and they wanna do what they wanna do to get it.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
Not to worry, the moderator that marked that post down as flamebait, I just made him pay in metamoderation :)
I agree with some points, not with others. Not all coal-fired power plants are created equal, which is part of th dissonance of this discussion. Some are very dirty, but some are remarkably clean. I originally read the report of epidemiological evidence of increased death rates due to air pollution's effects on respiratory disease in Chemical & Engineering News, the periodical of the American Chemical Society (my educational background is in chemistry). I'm afraid I don't have a reference though. Here's a link to an article on the subject that has a lot of relevant references. http://www.sp.uconn.edu/~an226vc/98newsltr.htm But obviously I can't speak specifically to Jodster's town. To deny that air pollution increases mortality does not reflect current data. But I'm wrong to limit this argument solely to coal-generated power. Obviously there are lots of sources of dangerous air pollution. Still, coal-generated electricity has unquestionably generated an enormous amount of air pollution in the United States. I may have misrepresented some of what Jodster said and if so I apologize. But this comment paints environmentalists with a very broad and unfair brush. Any "ism" represents a range of beliefs. To suggest that all environmentalists don't care about jobs, want all power plants shut down, support the government takeover of industry, and don't understand diminishing returns is clearly hyperbole on the same level environmentalists are accused of in this comment. Jodster is completely correct about California emissions laws being stricter than CAA and CAA being irrelevant to the issue of California's current energy situation. This was muddy reasoning on my part. There is also some muddy logic as regards the connection of coal, OPEC, and Natural gas. Of course, these issues are all connected, but it is a very complex picture while I painted a very simplistic one. But Jodster did bring coal generation into this discussion about CA in the first place, and I was responding to this original comment. Nevertheless, in retrospect I regret the tone of my original comment and my reliance on melodramatic sentiment.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
You nailed it. The Bay Area--already a crowded place--gets more crowded every time that some yuppie/dot-commer/whatever buys another god damned SUV. 15 MPG, and drive it everywhere. Don't build new power plants...we've got to live here! Buy the power from the Pacific Northwest, but don't dare raise my PG&E (electric co.) bill! I need that money to support my $10/day coffee habit! Dump the nuke waste in Nevada. California is important...Nevada is not, right? California is so god damned arrogant about this kind of stuff. If you want to live in a great place like that, you've got to pay the price. It's just part of the deal. I don't need to remind anyone from CA what they're paying in rent... Okay, enough scatter-brained ranting for one day:)
b) Solar is very cost effective if you allow the companies to charge more for it *and* require people to pay for it when the company provides it. You just need to pass a law which requires people to pay the additional costs for solar AND pay the company and extra 1% or 2% profit on top (multiplied by the percentage of the power which is solar).
I'm not sure I understand--let me try to summarize this. You're saying, "solar is very cost-effective, it just costs more". WTF? Have you no economic sense whatsoever? By the same token, generators run by people on hamster wheels are cost-effective.
The case that global warming exists as a result of non-natural causes is less than firmly established, and even if it is firmly established, are you really so sure that the societal advantages to these energy sources aren't worth the associated costs?
In short, if several billion peoples' lives are made better, I don't mind if a few hundred thousands lose their homes. Even if I lost my house, I wouldn't be calling to stop the use of oil. (My insurance company might be more motivated, but that's their problem).
How does the commercial US electric power network store energy? There has to be some buffer between supply and demand. Capacitance in lines isn't sufficient is it?
Who invented the SUV? Also many european cities actually have no car zones. So all though some of these countries might have these high performance cars they don't have any place to use them. Also since the cities tend to be more compact you can get too more stuff by walking or taking public transit. Also I've heard rumors that the germans tend to eat high fat foods, smoke quite a bit and still have lower death rates from lifestyle related illnesses. Most likely because they're willing to walk several kilometers in a day. Unlike americans who aren't willing to walk from the furtherest edge of a parking lot.
> You complain about California making your gas > prices go up. However you are quite willing to > spew out unlimited amounts of CO2 so that the > rest of the planet has to cope with global > warming caused by N America.
I hope that you know how to think. I know that most of the greenhouse gasses that are spewing out into the atmosphere are from alot of the 3rd world countries that the "civilized" world allows to do so that they can play catch up with them.
You can be replaced by a very small shell script.
Clearly, you don't. Cost effective does not mean cheaper. Cost effective means cost effective. There might be problems with what he's saying, but that's a damn weak rebuttal.
If a corporation is a personhood, is owning stock slavery?
First, you should not confuse the "not in my backyard" folks with the enviromentalists. These are two almost totally unrelated groups who want almost totally diffrent things, i.e. the "not in my backyard" people will be quit happy to see the power plant to go in the ecologically importent swamp in the next county..
Second, there are plenty of good reasons to get rid of the messy power plants and there are plenty of clean power alternatives:
a) I think breader reacters make very clean nukes and no enviromentalists are objecting to these things (they have a small problem that the millitary must monitor them since they produce high grade plutonium).
b) Solar is very cost effective if you allow the companies to charge more for it *and* require people to pay for it when the company provides it. You just need to pass a law which requires people to pay the additional costs for solar AND pay the company and extra 1% or 2% profit on top (multiplied by the percentage of the power which is solar).
Finally, it was deregulation and not enviromental regulations which prevented plants from being built. The companies felt they could delay building new plants to save money.
Also, who cares that CA is forcing people to replace their cars? That is a great idea and very few of the current cars will live for 10 years anyway. Hell, all the eco-friendly cars are cheaper to run (those saturn electric cars cost like 1/4th as much as a good gas car), so making everyone buy one will mean that the price must drop. Who knows maybe I will be able to buy a cheap eco-friendly car on the east cost in a few years.
Anyway, no one will sit arround for rolling blackouts. The government will pay for new plants and (hopefully) the power company officials will go to jail. Who knows maybe they will just export the socialist power from LA to the rest of the state.
Because CNN is a mecca for bullshit liberal journalism.
See you in hell,
Bill Fuckin' Gates®.
See you in hell,
Bill Fuckin' Gates®.
(This post is ©2001 Microsoft(TM) Corporation.)
Stupid Intel chips use too much power.
If all the hot Silicon Valley companies would switch to PowerPC chips, power consumption would go way down. :-)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
[rant] Because of the way natural gas pipelines are (and the location of various bottlenecks), British Columbia is in essentially the same market for natural gas as California. Now, because of all your bullshit anti-nuclear legislation, you're sucking down all the natural gas in sight, and it's caused our natural gas prices to skyrocket. We had nothing to do with your stupid laws, and no control over your ridiculous policies, but we have to pay the price. We have poor old ladies freezing their asses off in our cold Canadian winter because they can't afford to heat their homes any more, and it's your fault. Assholes... [/rant]
When will you figure out that nuclear and hydro are about as good as it gets? Most of our power is hydro, which is cheap and clean... You guys could buy some CanDu nuclear reactors off us--they're quite safe. Worst case accident, the reactor overheats, the heavy water (which is the moderator) boils off, and the reaction stops because it's no longer moderated. No Chernobyls, no Three Mile Islands, no fuss, no muss.
California would be a really great state if you could only get rid of those wackos making the stupid laws...
The overhead lights are out in about 80% of the company, people have to use little cube lights to see. Some prefer to work in the dark anyway, but it sure is a pain in the ass trying to assemble serves via a flashlight.
Intel said they wouldn't even think of building another plant in California, and other businesses are loking out of state to move/build.
At home, trying to do our part...we use the fireplace for hear.
sucks to be here. traffic, cost of living, continual threat of power outages, but hey at least the tech stocks are kicking butt. heh.
-- Viva FreeBSD --
"Staring out the window at the idle Altamont windmill farm..." Well of course it's idle. Running it in the wind storms we're having would break the things. The Altamont farms produce most during summer nights when there is relatively constant and predictable wind blowing from the coast into the Valley.
Did it ever occur to you that natural gas is a scarce non-renewable energy source? Just because government fixes the price so everyone can afford to use (waste) as much as they want does not translate into an unlimited supply, it just looks like it to consumers. If not for short cited price fixing then maybe the slowly increasing prices would have motivated consumers to seek other energy sources before the situation hit a crisis point.
You and people like you are fucking hypocrites and are just as greedy and selfish as you accuse the Big Evil Power Companies (tm) of being. YOU want cheap energy, YOU want it so badly YOU elect a government that makes it illegal for businesses to raise/lower prices to adjust to a changing economic and enviromental situation. YOU wanted cheap energy regardless of what a fixed price would do to the long term viability of the resource or the effect such regulation would have on the developement of alternitive engery sources. Like the fools in Cali I laugh at your (expected) $600 dollar gas bills, and as far as people freezing to death, call it natural selection, maybe the survivors won't be so fucking stupid in the future.
"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" - Kurt Vonnegut
Forget photo-voltaic? So the people I know with a solar house, that are selling power back to PG&E, I just hallucinated them?
So they bought $20,000 plus worth of solar panels.... They'll have their investment paid for about the time the terminal lugs on the panels corrode through. I'm not saying this isn't a somewhat viable solution, but it doesn't scale well, and you need some nasty chemical batteries to get you through the night. It's close to a zero sum gain unfortunately.... At least for now. I am researching adding a 2KW array to the roof of my house. If electricity really does hit $0.30 per KWh, like some think may happen, the economics of it changes somewhat. Some may say that's good, because it will make PV solar economical... But it would wreck the California economy, and plunge the world, not just the USA, the whole freaking world into a recession.
Temkin
Staring out the window at the idle Altamont windmill farm...
Lack of wind? No way. More Taco Bells in California than anywhere.
A little misunderstanding? Galileo and the Pope had a little misunderstanding...
[But what Bill isn't telling you is that a monster destroyed his "Bill Town" Sim City Classic creation in April of 1994. This started his jyhad against Mozilla. No, really.]
See you in hell,
Bill Fuckin' Gates®.
See you in hell,
Bill Fuckin' Gates®.
(This post is ©2001 Microsoft(TM) Corporation.)
The blackouts warning wasn't just in S.F. I live down a bit in Monterey and we got the warning as well on our local news that we too might see rolling blackouts. I should note though that our main problem was (according to the news) that 1/3 of the power wasn't available due to a local storm and the fact that many power plants were scheduled to go partly offline for maintenance.
Yeah, blame the government. Nevermind that people are afraid of it, and the government tends to react when the voters show disfavor. It's clearly the government. Please. People are freaked over genetically engineered vegetables (but not pesticide-laced ones?) and irradiated meat, and there's no reason to believe properly applying either is harmful (whereas nuclear plants produce nuclear waste when operating properly). But, clearly, it's the Federal Government's fault.
If a corporation is a personhood, is owning stock slavery?
They're called sidewalks, parks, and buildings, hun.
If a corporation is a personhood, is owning stock slavery?
Heh. What about the cars that, BY DESIGN, had an oil resevoir on the top of the engine and just let it all slowly drip out the bottom? Hey! The dirt road absorbed that!
For sure! Kept down the dust!
Back when I was a kid at the cottage my parents rented, the highway department used to actually go through and oil the dirt road with used motor oil.
Just up the bank from a lake, at that. (Lac Cameron, Laurentian Mountains, southwestern Quebec, Canada)
That was about 1983-1984. Horrible as it sounds, at the time, this was thought to be a perfectly acceptable practice.
Fortunately, used motor oil is now quite a valuable commodity. It's readily recycled into new motor and machine oil, so it doesn't get dumped very often.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I certainly wouldn't lose much sleep over it, no. You realize that modern nuclear reactors aren't built like Chernobyl and that if a disaster strokes, the reaction will fizzle instead of meltdown, right? Most of the fear of nuclear plants in this day and age is due to unsubstantiated paranoia.
Honestly, I think nuclear is the way to go. Yes, there is nuclear waste, but all power generation methods have their downsides, and nuclear's seem to be the least annoying.
Has it ever occured to you that maybe we don't _have_ to get dirty *snip* We should just quit trying to make the world better and just live with smog and pollution.
Aren't those statements self-contradicting?
The highly intelligent and semi-famous Dr. Bill Wattenburg, former Los Alamos scientist and part-time radio talk show host at KGO-AM San Francisco, had this to say last month.
Basically he is saying deregulation, the sale of existing public plants to private companies, and politically-driven denial of the need for new power plants over the past decade have combined to create the existing situation.
Another interesting thing he has said in the past (no link, sorry) is that if a small fraction of the EPA's money spent on dubious programs were put into insulating people's homes, California could clean its air faster, and lower its energy demands much more dramatically and quickly. But it's just not popular politically.
Anybody want a peanut?
You forgot the "stealth" factor with respect to photo speed radar guns. The hood reflected incoming radiowaves up, while the radiator coils below the hood were slanted and reflected the radiowaves down into the ground. So almost nothing reflects back to the radar gun!
Yeah, all one would need to do for complete stealth would be to hang a CD from the rear view mirror to deflect a laser speed trap. [sigh]
First off, radar waves are a kind of radio wave, in a band called "Microwave", because the wavelength is so short. They're highly directional, like light; but they pass through, and are reflected by, the same things as ordinary radio waves. Radar speed traps usually run in X-band, which is about 12GHz, and is usually generated with a Gunn diode with a 1/2 wave antenna poking into a piece of waveguide.
In a Fiero, the hood - the *whole* hood - is plastic. Microwave energy will go right through it, hit the firewall behind, and bounce back to the gun. The Doppler effect (the same thing that makes a train whistle appear to change in pitch as it goes past you) is read by a computer which then calculates your speed and puts it on the display (and therefore onto the impending speeding ticket).
Yes, the radiator - which is aluminum, and is angled at about 35-40 degrees forward - will reflect some of the energy toward the ground. But there'll be more than enough coming off the car's steel unibody for the cop to get a good read off you.
And, no, the CD hanging from the rear view mirror doesn't stealth you from laser speed guns, despite the urban legend that every Home Boyzzz in a chainsaw-mufflered Integra seems to believe.
Here's what you do if you want to avoid police radar: don't drive like an idiot. Speed limits are in place because many people aren't capable of driving faster than the speed limit on a given stretch of road. Actually, most people around here are probably marginally capable of a given speed limit at best.
And if you must drive like an idiot, use brains. Look around the electronics surplus places for an old X-band magnetron. You don't need precision, you need one that fires. That's all. Probably your best bet for finding one is scrapped marine radar equipment.
Then, you need a slotted antenna, and a right angled waveguide bend. Make sure that you put choke to flat as you're assembling it, and make sure all the surfaces are clean. You want the magnetron behind your radiator support and the antenna's slots facing the road in front of you. Put a big piece of heatshrink tubing over the slotted antenna to keep crap out of it. Relax, the heatshrink is transparent to microwave energy.
Now, you need a radar detector (hide it but install it carefully) and a 12 volt strobe light. And a DC regulator that suits the filament voltage of your magnetron.
Hook the voltage regulator up so that the magnetron's filament on whenever the ignition is on. Hook the strobe light's high voltage output across the magnetron's pulse leads (usually both the filament leads referenced to ground). Hook the strobe light up so that it starts firing when the radar detector detects something. Hide the whole arrangement so that it's invisible. The radar detector is legal, the rest of this is a big FCC fine if the cop wants to push it.
What happens?
The magnetron is a tube. Most marine magnetrons are rated between 2.5kW and 25kW of output power at 12GHz. Note that this is for a very short duty cycle pulsetrain. (In radar terms, this is the "trigger" pulse.) Now, like most tubes, the filament takes a few seconds to heat up, so you want this warm whenever the ignition is on.
In driving, with the magnetron already nice and warm, the radar detector working, if a cop points a radar gun at you, the radar detector will turn on the strobe light circuit. However, instead of the strobe light, the strobe circuit pulses the magnetron and makes it fire. Net power output? Can't tell you, but you can calculate it from the strobe circuit's output voltage, capacitor ratings and the magnetron type you scored. Basically, though, it's gonna be short pulses of a *hell* of a lot more than the 100mW or so that the radar gun is firing at you. Peak power at the top of the pulses would probably be in the range of a kilowatt. RMS power probably under 5 watts. Way more than enough.
You will foul the gun's receiver section. In fact, you could theoretically damage it.
As for risks involved, you're running an unlicensed transmitter. You can be fined by the FCC for that. Health and safety? Don't stand in front of it when it's firing. No, it won't give you cancer, it's not ionizing radiation, but, like a microwave oven, the burn hurts *a lot*. Be careful of the high voltages you're using to pulse the magnetron.
Credentials for telling you this? Take a look at my User Info here. Yeah, I work for Litton Marine Systems. Yeah, I do all sorts of really weird things for them, from computers to designing radar equipment. And yeah, I built one of these, and while I've tested it with a police radar gun, I've never had the balls to install it in a car. Oh, and yeah, I had a 1985 Fiero 2M4 SE, 5-speed transmission; bought it for $350 bucks and rebuilt the motor, replaced the clutch and changed all 6 balljoints in the suspension myself. I know those cars quite intimately.
As for thwarting a laser speed trap? Get out the sandblaster and frost your windshield. Then paint the whole car, windows included, with flat black paint. I think this system may have adverse side effects, but it would work.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Rolling blackouts do not happen in all major metropolitan areas.
They don't happen in London.
They don't happen in Birmingham.
They don't happen in Manchester.
Oh, you mean all AMERICAN metropolitan areas?
Personally I find it bewildering that the US is unable to produce enough power to keep going. Even though the UK is not always able to meet peak demands, when we do have a shortfall we can cover the extra by using spare capacity from France. Who in turn can call on half of Europe.
If that can be done in Europe, where we don't even speak the same language, and have a history of hatred, xenophobia and kicking the French, I'm stunned that the US can't do the same.
~Cederic
In Japan, they also are running out of power. To compensate, they literally are throwing solar panels on everyone's roof they can. These installations are done by the power company for free with the understanding that any excess electricity goes to their grid for free. Blocks upon blocks of houses have been equipped like this.
I wish I had a link to give out, but unfortunately I only know about this through seminars. Granted, solar panels are usually ugly (there are roof shingle versions, but they are expensive and output less power than the big ones), but would you rather be ugly with power, or beautiful without it?
The new Sun campus in Santa Clara has huge Onan diesel generators outside each building. We got to test them during an outage last summer. The grid dropped, and the gen sets kicked in about 30 seconds later. UPS protected systems were fine, everything else died and had to be rebooted. When the grid came back, there was no noticeable cutover brown-out. All in all, it worked well. All our critical systems are protected by UPS's. I was working on a docked laptop at the time, and just had to wait for my monitor to power back up. The laptop ran off it's battery while the gen set started. :-)
Temkin
Well I just got home and have a 32 day uptime, so either my UPS is working as it should, or these rolling blackouts are about as real as "IT". -- Burlingame, CA
-Praxxis
There are no rolling power outages. Shell Beach is across the bridge. And you, you will sleeeeeeeeeep... (smiles and extends hand across face as you close your eyes and fall to the ground)...
Effective 01/12/2001 at 00:17 (PST of course)
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
Hallucination? No. Realistic? NO.
:-)
It's ONE house. You didn't mention how much power they're selling back... nor did you mention how much they use . Did they mention how much that great house cost? Probably not in my price range....
I can run my whole house on solar power if I use lower-consumption devices. But that means no second fridge for cold drinks or spare freezer for my juicy bacon-wrapped filet's. I might even have to return my shiny new 36" Wega. That won't happen....
-sid
How bad it is to live in a place where the only alternatives in life are power cuts or environmental meltdown.
There is such a thing as guzzling loads of electricity and perhaps if people bothered to cut their power usage once in a while the system might be able to cope.
I don't mean never turning on your television, just switching off lights when there's no-one in the room, that sort of thing.
The alternative? Well it is not looking pretty is it...?
Mod up :-)
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Now would be a prime time for GE and other companies to release their home power generation systems. They all work a bit differently, but the basic concept is that you slap this air-conditioner sized box in your garage, hook it up to some supply (hydrogen, propane, natural gas, etc...). The box runs the supply through the fuel cells and produces power for your home.
Definitely the wave of the future.
-
The IHA Forums
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
All I know is, as a resident of Glendale, CA, one of the only cities in the Los Angeles area which has it's own generation plant (approximately 1 1/2 miles down the road from me), there are advantages of having a city council who is willing to tell the stupider eco-freeks to fuck off. (I say "stupider" because the 8 steam power generation plants are partially fueled by methane gas recovered from the city-run compost dump--a fact that is happily ignored by those eco-freeks who have a "mission" and no brains.)
That means while the rest of the state is going dark as PG&E and Edison goes belly up, I can run around and flip on all the lights in my house! Wooh hoo!
I can't tell whether this guy is a fool or a troll, honestly. Personally, I'd love to see the state government steal everyone's cars and cut them up into scrap. Sure, force everyone to walk! Not only would we be a less polluted nation, we'd be a less coronary-prone one as well. The possibility of maybe not slurping up quite so much electric power has already been addressed by others so I won't repeat after them.
Things I do to conserve energy..
:-)
All fluorescent bulbs except in the bathroom where they are used for too short of times to be energy efficient, unplugging coffee maker, VCR, DVD player and other things with clocks and such when not using them.
Wearing a sweatshirt in the house and turning down the heat. An extra blanket on my bed, living in the semidark with few lights on at night.
Turning off monitors when not sitting directly in front of them (those things pull a lot of power, and with a real OS, you don't necessarily need a machine's monitor on to use it, either).
Turning my windows machine off when I wont have time for games for ahwile.
My apartment is pretty well insulated, and I have vertical blinds that I use strategically to either let light in or create an air pocket for insulation, depending on the weather.
Of course, I live on a pretty tight budget so I have more motives than saving the environment, but I like to think that is part of why I do it.
I work for an IT consulting firm in San Francisco.
::sigh::
One of our client's offices power was cut off during the day and we had a guy in the office to shut the servers down because their UPS is not large enough to last extended blackouts. The blackout lasted two hours. Out client will not pay for larger UPSes.
In the process, the DSL was (surprise) down, but it did not come back up when power was restored. Apparently the router, a Cayman model, decided to reset itself back to defaults.
I called Pacific Bell Internet in order to see if I could get a trouble ticket (at 7 PM -- yeah right!). The woman on the phone didn't say much, in fact, the only way I knew I dialed the right number was I was on hold for 30 minutes. All the woman could tell me was that it was my fault ("You provide the line") when I told her I represented the consulting firm that took care of the servers. Then she told me that PacBell was down "in California" so apparently it would be fixed when PacBell fixed everything else that had gone wrong. So much for major corporations having backup power.
No wonder my boss hates Pacific Bell, and we make every effort to recommend that our clients not use them for any sort of service... T1/PRI/DSL/ISDN. They have the worst customer support, and the worst techs. It took them two months to get a T1 line installed... they blamed us for the longest time until they realized it was there faulty wiring.
No offense if you work at PacBell and know what's going on. Contact me and we'd be happy to get you some commissions on sales if you can actually get things done.
Ironically, my website, which runs on PacBell DSL, was not down during the "system wide problems," nor did my power go off (I live in the city).
Mmmmm... mission.. mmm.. Burritos.. Mmmm.. Taqueria Can-Cun
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/10/opinion/10KRUG.h tml
Paul Krugman always knows what's what...
Wake up! You've never truly had deregulation. There have been no new power plants constructed in California in the last ten years because of the draconian environmental laws which make it prohibitively expensive to build and then operate a power plant of ANY kind. Then you go and double the population of your state (more than double, actually), and nearly triple the power consumption. Golly Sarge, I don't get it! We should have gobs of cheap power right?
Supply and Demand baby. You've got plenty of demand, and they can't supply it. At least by charging the customers more, you'd think they'd learn to shut off a few lights.
The interesting thing is that things are going to get much worse over the next two years. When 2002 comes around I expect a significant number of Democrats to be replaced by Republicans in both state and national races. Too bad Barbara Boxer is not up for reelection until 2004. Talk about a liar and theif.
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darueber muss man schweigen. Ludwig Wittgenstein
"Hey, Joe, got a light?"
"Yeah, Bob, just a sec...I need to light up my smoke first..."
Ka-BOOOOOOOOOOOM
And I've seen an engineer lose a finger because the iron pinky ring that engineers wear got shorted across a car battery.
The outlets on the battery must have been pretty close together for the Iron Ring to short it out. The largest Iron Ring I ever saw belonged to a guy that had a pinky roughly the size of my thumb, and that's still not quite an inch across.
ERTW!
--
Do I play Hockey?
What you say!!
Georgia has a democratic governor and the Mayor of Atlanta has sued gun manufacturers for liability in the death of children shot by the weapons they made. Atlanta and the State of Georgia, are hardly some kind of liberal-free zone. CNN is a liberal news agency. Its creator, Ted Turner, is a liberal.
It's up to you to decide if the word liberal has negative connotations.
When the topics are technical, Slashdot has a really good signal/noise ratio. Smart things get modded up; stupid things get modded down and/or stomped on.
Here, though, we see what happens when it's a topic where people don't know much about. The volume is just as high, the opinions are just firm. But most people are just talking out their asses, and moderators are giving big points to Limbaugh-like rants without a scrap of fact in 'em.
Since this article already has enough opinion, I'll just stick to a few facts and some interesting links.
I live in San Francisco, so I've been following this closely. A very interesting site for the curious is the California Independent System Operator, an organization responsible for the long-distance high-voltage lines and the power that flows over them. They have a FAQ, a diagram that shows how the power flows, and an up-to-the-minute graph showing projected and actual power load. (I say we all pick a time tomorrow to turn off everything and see if we can make the graph drop.)
Personally, I use 100% renewable power from utility.com. (I actually pay less than others, but I'd happily pay more for my green preferences.) They are certified by Green-e, a non-profit that verifies the power content. (The typical mix for California uses only 12% renewables, with 20% coal, 20% large hydroelectric, 31% natural gas, and 16% nuclear. (Yes, large hydroelectric is counted separately; it's not considered very environmentally friendly these days.)
There are several good articles in the New York Times about all this, including one on following the money. There is also one on how Texas plans to do it differently. And as subscribers to The Economist know, California's deregulation was a pretty shoddy job compared to other utility deregulations around the world.
So those of you who lay the blame entirely on environmental regs from California's own special blend of fruits, nuts, and flakes should research a little further. You'll find a picture that's much more interesting and complex: political dithering, a lack of foresight, corporate greed, and plenty of plain old stupidity are involved.
Is that about 20% of the power producing plants in California are suddenly down for 'maintaince'. Shove that up yer power outages... Power crisis my ass.
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
well, this guy clearly has an axe to grind and this email was clearly designed to generate flamage but basically... he's an idiot. california's "deregulation", as anyone who has looked into it in any way will agree, is a sham and a disaster. necessary services like utilities are a shitty place to try out "free market" economics in any case but calfornia's attempt was particularly lame. blaming environmental regulation is nonsensical. california's environmental laws haven't changed recently and up until this deregulation fiasco we had a reasonable amount of power for a reasonable price and steadily improving air and water quality to boot. finally, the whole lame-brained notion that we have to poison ourselves in order to have electrical power is laughable. in spite of incessant foot-dragging by industry and whining by "business leaders" and others like our friend here the tech community has made great strides in the last half-century or so and will hopefully continue to do so. i have no doubt that clean, safe generation technology exists and that we are on our way to discovering it. let's just hope the whiners don't drown in their own tears before we do.
I have only used dead wood or trees damaged by storms with two wood stoves and a woodchip electric generator. One might think that the property would slowly lose all of its trees but this is not the case. The number of trees and volume of wood on the property now is greater than when I moved in. I also have my own septic system and well so that I can be completely independent of government supplied services.
Obviously, this is not a solution for LA or NYC but it can work for the individual who wants to strike out on his own. It is also environmentally sound. Removing the dead wood improves the look of the property and the remaining trees are healthier.
peugeots rock! my dad has driven one for 12 years without any probs, even though it was made in coventry!
Couldn't be all the idiots that have thousands of computers running 24/7. Nor could it be all the fancy electric appliances, dishwashers, dryers, refrigerators, garage door openers. Nor could it be the fault of the consumers of not changing energy hogging ways, could it? Nope, its those darned environmentalists. Yep, them green sap suckin eco freaks that live in the woods with no electricity, plumbing, etc. Yep.. its all there fault.
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
I would like to know where all those whining enviornmentalists agaist nuclear power are now... IN THE DARK!! I guess they just love the luxury of having power now do they? ----- "There comes a time in life when you must take a piss in the sink." -Peter Ovalsky, Second Poem
> Thoroughly, California made its own mess and ought to be forced to wallow in it. You're all screwed and it's your own fault.
So, the utilities vigorously opposed the 1996 legislation, and the governer only signed it because his hand was forced by anti-business interests?
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The head of L.A. Power saw this crisis coming. He did not join the bandwagon to deregulate. Now, L.A. customers don't have to worry about the blackouts. Also, L.A. is producing power for the rest of the grid at super inflated prices. This is one time deregulation turned into a massive failure.
The core of the problem is basic business stupidity. All the new electricity resellers are bound by price controls. The high cost of of fuel means that they now have to sell for less than it costs to produce.
Hence, blackouts. What a clusterf%!k!
Send it on a collision course with a star and see how long it lasts.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
ok, so the eco thing didn't work, we here in california got ourselves in bad shape. So, you say we should just have to suffer??? how do you think the world economy would fair if there was no power in california? true, most large companies have redundant net presence in other areas but the mind share is here. If california loses power the whole world pays. I think other states should show a bit of compassion and help out. At least we were trying to help the enviornment.
> 5. candle light wild wild sex.
...
> 8. take one shower a day instead of two.
Nah, should be
8. shower with a 'friend'
.. but i suppose that'll be after #5
<? include ('signature.inc'); ?>
No one is going to read this, but there is a flaw in your argument. The US borders CANADA and MEXICO. The state of California has a population greater than that of Canada. Why would we in Canada, generate that much power? We have enough to power our cities (we also build CANDU nuclear reactors...). Do you really think the US is going to get extra power from Mexico?? Same reason. Europe has a *slightly* higher population than the Americas. As other posters have noted, it has been the legislation in California that has hurt the power industry.
San Francisco is going to start rolling blackouts today!
So? Several years ago, when I lived in the Baltimore area, I remember having rolling blackouts during the hottest parts of the summer because people were using all the available energy on air conditioning.
The real problem is California's broken-headed energy polciy. Like the following idiocies.
Since then, the price of oil has TRIPLED fro $10 to $30 a barrel. So transportation costs rose, storage costs rose, and finally generation costs rose as well.
Now, while market price is skyrocketing elsewhere (and out-of state entities are willing to buy the power at those prices), California's whining and bitching because these companies won't sell their power below-cost. Never mind that the debt load already incurred by these companies for doing business in California has already climbed into the billions of dollars.
Basically, the California government needs to get their heads on straight (and out of their asses) and stop trying to cater to politically correct energy policies. Because how politically correct is it to shut off someone's power in the middle of winter or the middle of a heatwave?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Heheheh, I remember that! I was working in Palo Alto at the time (didn't affect my site) and my roomate was working in San Mateo--- their servers elsewhere in the Bay Area fell down, went boom. Silly PG&E!
The Onion isnt produced over the winter breaks of University of Wisconsin system schools, or during the summer. I go to the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. You guys dont know what you're missing if you dont get the Onion IN PRINT. That paper is something of an institution here. It's in those "free publication" racks all over campus that are usually dominated by "rental guide" or "auto seller". I dont care if this is OT, but its cool. The Onion returns NEXT week.
"Dancing is the vertical expression of a horizontal desire" --Robert Frost
Well, some of the environmentalist literature that I've read suggest that european equipment tends to be about twice as efficient as the amazingly wasteful american stuff. No I can't support that claim, other than perhaps americans just tend to waste too much by living in big houses, driving big cars, and just generally using stuff larger than they need.
(1) no nuclear reactors (waste/safety issues)
(2) no coal fired power plants (air emissions issues)
(3) no diesel fired power plants (air emmissions again)
(4) no hydroelectric plants (harms [cuddly species of the day]'s habitat)
(5) in fact, no new power plants at all ("not in *my* backyard!")
(6) you shut down existing plants from (1), (2), (3), and (4)
(7) Solar and geothermal don't seem to work like you think... or at all (i.e., operate at a loss).
Well, congrats... your air and water still suck. Species are still going extinct. You put all your eggs on natural gas which is now drying up and prices skyrocketing, you're freezing your asses off and whining about power shortages, high prices, and rolling bloackouts.
And now you:
(1) want continued legislation to FORCE other states to sell power to CA companies headed into bankruptcy? (Who wants to sell to deadbeats?)
(2) Blame deregulation for the energy shortage! Can't have liberals blaming their eco legislation or (gasp!) call for repealing some of it.
(3) Don't give a flying fuck that other states have to pollute more to keep CA on electrical welfare?
Thoroughly, California made its own mess and ought to be forced to wallow in it. You're all screwed and it's your own fault.
What will you do? Here's my prediction: Democrats will do ***NOTHING***. They'll sit and endure the rolling blackouts and come up with bullshit to justify them to the people. They will wait for republicans to propose building more power plants, and repealing the legislation preventing their construction. They will quietly vote to approve these measures amid much muttering and while speaking against it or more likely, will simply abstain on eco-law repealing bills to give republicans a majority (among remaining legislators who actually vote) to let the bills pass. Then when anyone, ANYONE complains about air quality or water pollution or nuclear waste in California they will "blame republicans for rolling back all our hard work to protect your environment." Saying they never voted to support that legislation. Yeah right.
You want power? Then you have to get dirty *just* *like* *everyone* *else*. TANSTAAFL, you know?
IMO, Republicans ought to continue the staredown with democrats until they start repealing their own legislation. Make the basterds squirm and swallow their own bullshit pride. As for the populations without power? Well, at least they'll learn what voting for liberals results in (stone age living) and will know better and teach their kids better in the future.
Um, did I miss anything here?
Free tip for CA denizens: The Plan to steal your cars from you via smog regs is already well underway. Start fighting it now. Basically it combines (1) smog check rules DESIGNED TO FAIL A PERCENTAGE of cars (with an eventual goal of 97% of all cars over 10 years old) with (2) rules that make it ILLEGAL to keep an unregistered vechicle on your property. (1) + (2) = State power to STEAL YOUR CARS and crush them into cubes. See http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/1223/sb42/smo gflyer_5.html for more details.
Dave
time to invest in the UPS companies - can you imagine the power backup needed?
Yeah, Rah Rah for the Capitalist system which sends you $400 bills on your 'reliable' natural gas source. You stupid, stupid loser. In Canada I pay $95 for gas. In the dead of winter. And those are Canadian dollars.
Of course, the F--ing conservatives have also hoodwinked the public up here over the last ten years and massive deregulation is on the way.
I expect brownouts, $600 gas bills, and plenty of old folks frozen to death in this berg over the next few years thanks to bone heads like you who can't find the pencil, and so vote with their greedy little penises.
Oh, that's right. Votes don't count down there in the World's Flagship of Democracy, do they? My apologies. I forgot about that.
Get your head out of the sand.
-Fantastic Lad. --Politically Disabled!
I'd have to say that I am very happy with the stability of the power here in Denmark. I have no powerouts, brownouts or whatever. You can have a server running with a uptime of 2 years or more without problems(or course you need a proper OS).
In fact, our power is so good that I often have a hard time selling a UPS to my clients. I need to bring in the computers-in-industrial-environments speech and the conditioning of the power before they buy it.
And then of course install monitoring software so they can see that it does something, so they see why it is a good thing for their next system.
--------
Have you actually ever been to California??? Drive around a bit and you'll see all the sorts of power plants that you'll have the readers of slashdot believe are shut down due to eco bills. Ever heard of Diablo Canyon? Its a nuclear power plant with 3 reactors. If you drive around the Sierra-Nevada Mountains, near the Nevada border you'll see a bunch of hydro-electric plants using run-off from the snow pack. There's a huge coal plant that you'll pass on a drive from San Francisco to Pebble Beach, and there are diesel plants all over the place.
I have no idea where you got the idea that solar and or geothermal are a prime source of power in California, there are a few test plants to see the feasability of the idea but to say its a prime power source is an all out lie.
Then you start this whole partisan rant about how liberals, specificly democrats, are evil and how Republicans are the new saviors sent from God, That's a load of BS.
I guess you want the the citizens of California to have the air like they have in such Republican strongholds like Huston, Texas, which passed LA as the country's worst air. Or maybe you'd like us to have water like they due in New Jersey, mmm... I can taste that brown water now.
There's a reason we blame deregulation, because prior to deregulation we weren't forced to endure blackouts, We've had most of our eco legislation for more than 20 years without any problems but deregulation is only about 4 years old. Which seems the more likely source of the energy problems???
Now your idea about letting California sit in the dark, that's just completely idiotic. You have any idea how many critical company facilities for a varety of companies are here??? The Economy would nose dive and on your boy, GWB's, watch. Do you think the Republicans could win the house and senate in a downward spiralling economy with a Republican as president???
As to if you've missed anything, I think I've made it evident that you have.
Your last point is laughable, we're supposed to believe something from geocities as being completely true?
In my final point I'd like to say, the comment by SlushDot is a clear (-1, Troll/Flaimbait), not a (4) with that many blatent lies.
I only have 2 issues with what you said:
>There is a terrible air pollution problem in
>California; the emissions standards are designed
>to alleviate this. Very few older cars may be
>able to pass these inspections.
Well that is sure nice if you have a newer car that can pass these inspections... Though of course you do realize this forces you to buy a new car every few years (as the rules increase)... I bet the car dealerships love this idea. But besides that, what about your poorer people (while I don't live in CA if I did while being paid as I am now I'd have this problem)? Ever think how you have just pretty much legistlated away their right to drive if they can't keep up with buying cars? & not used cars either those are a risk to get as you'll have to toss it after paying for it (used car loans normally go 3-5 years, on a 3-5 year old car it's very borderline). So in other words you'll have to buy either a) a brand new car or b) a year or so old used car for almost as much... Best pray the minimum wage goes up in CA to be over 40k a year so everyone working (Oh & can't forget those the government gives money to, they vote you know so we need to now raise taxes)...
>Whether your car's driving on your property or
>on the highways, it's still polluting a common
>resource; the air we breathe. Or would you
>accept it if someone moves next door to you and
>starts burning huge piles of tires 24 hours a
>day (why not? it's on his property!)
In fact I have been through places were my neighbor was burning tires where I live (PA)... Maybe it's the high number of rural living people who can't be policed (even if they do live right off a main road so it's quite visible)... Sure I don't like it, but I can't go around stomping out peoples cigerretes/cigars either & they pollute the air (& my lungs) as well... Heck I'm even medically allergic to smoke & I'm still not given that right... It's one of these deals where certain abuses of my shared air with you are ok, but your examples aren't... Frankly I think we need to even things up...
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
And the amazing thing is someone's done it. Electro-Biking
What's funny is that actually sounds like a good idea compared to what is going on right now!
It'll never work, but it is an incredibly neat solution.
So yes! We must install a system at once which uses the excuse of 'scarce' resources, (there's shit loads of natural gas, fool.), to generate an atmosphere where gas companies can make a killing selling only to the wealthy. And you're right! Fuck the old people! Heck, why delay the inevitable? Let's force Social Darwinism down the throats of those who were not smart enough to take business degrees but instead decided to occupy themselves in the 'lesser' occupations which still need doing in our society but which are not geared toward total greed! Let's ship them off to concentration camps at once! (Because you know, I've heard that they're dirty and don't even bath. They are certainly less worthy of life than you!)
But seriously. . .
While the government up here does, (or rather, did until recently), regulate prices, nobody was out of pocket. No borrowing was needed. Gas was mined, sold at a modest profit, and the city had heat at a reasonable price. Gee. That evil liberal thinking will be our undoing!
And I don't know what morally deficient headspace you think I'm from, but I certainly don't need to have punishment hanging over me in order to use fuel sensibly. I turn the heat down when I leave the house like everybody else. Fifty bucks off my gas bill is fifty bucks off my gas bill.
And yes, natural gas is nonrenewable, but it is the cleanest alternative at the moment. And yes, I'd love to run a Cold Fusion cell in my basement, or a ZPE amplifier, or a Tesla generator, but so far the plans for such are not forthcoming. And pardon me for being 'hypocritical' but what form of political thinking do you believe is primarily responsible for this? Here's a hint: it's certainly not the people you voted for. (You'd actually derive self satisfaction from old people dying of frostbite? You're calling me selfish?)
-Oh, I'm sorry. Have you been programmed so well that you didn't even bother to do your own research into how free energy technologies have been suppressed, believing the crap that CNN feeds you? If you'd bothered to do your homework, (And yes, it takes work to acquire knowledge), you would certainly have a different opinion of things. (And I'm not talking about X-files conspiracy nonesense. The story behind Cold Fusion in particular was fascinating to follow. There was a mountain of info regarding how it was covered up and who did the covering. Granted, there's a lot less info now, but the scramble at the time to kill it was unbelievably messy. Everything from doctored results at M.I.T. to covered up deaths from exploding cells. It all seemed to work, though. The sleepers certainly bought it!)
As it stands, though, smarmy twerp like you might just as well take your gullible ass and pull on a clean Gap T-shirt, drink another Coke, and go back to your Playstation with the warm & fuzzy belief that, Yes you are better and smarter than old people and hypocrites like me.
-Fantastic Lad
Recall the HomeGen 7000 system GE was said to have available sometime in 2001?. The Slashdot link can be found here. It looks very promising, all you need is a gas line and then you got instant electricity. If GE got these things out now in California, I'm sure alot of people would pay anything to get one..
It appears that GE removed the product description off of their page however. If anyone is able to find a mirror or more info on GE's site, just reply to this comment and attach it. It's a pretty neat system.
--Kumba
"And all this vegetable world appeared on my left foot, as a bright sandal formed immortal of precious stones and gold: I stooped down and bound it on to walk forward through eternity." --Milton 21:4-14 (Bruce Dickinson's The Chemical Wedding: The Alchemist)
political parties ran misleading advertisements is another issue entirely
Well, if at least 2 parties ran advertisement saying 2 opposite things, then at least one of them is misleading...
Repairmen 2nd moto : if it ain't broke, don't fix it...
Not to mention the fact that with all their air-cond, huge fridge, big lighting, etc... the average american use twice as much energy as the average west-european, whose level of comfort is not so much different.
Oh I forgot, everyone pointing those facts is an anti-american green comie propagating false rumors. Everyone NEEDS a big SUV.
You are correct in your assesment of a car's impact on your environment. You could always move, you know. What if that person needs that car to get to the grocery store or the doctor? Public transportation in this country is less than urgently run. Sure the car's pollution might affect you (less than you think...suicide by car-in-garage is almost impossible these days) but the lack of that vehicle can certainly affect a person's quality of life.
Blar.
I remember that, I was driving down Trousadale in Burlingame and actually saw a flash from the short circut at the substation near cyote point in San Mateo. They gave us the day off from school that day =).
Actually, bad weather leads to more electricity being produced, in our parts of the world. But then 55-60% from our power stems from hydro :>
Thanks for the interesting elaboration
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
What most people don't realize is that most of the REALLY smart geeks from the 'Valley live in San Francisco. I would LOVE to see the loss of income associated with shutting down a city with such a productive population.
Ug.
Well... my obvious thought was that cars do it...
And, well, this kind of resource wasn't available for 'decades', ultra efficient flywheels.
IIRC, it was Roseman Motors, or someone similar, doing research on ultra high speed ultra efficient flywheels?
You are a dork. Oh well.
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
Rolling blackouts happen. They've happened in Silicon Valley before, they happen in all major metropolitan areas.
I used to be the senior Unix admin for the largest nuclear power company in the US. Here's the abridged version of how these things happen:
1) There's a huge stock-market-like brokerage for energy across the USA.
2) Power companies are basically market players, betting on energy futures. They use data to predict the energy usage for a given day, and buy any they can't produce to cover the overage.
3) Power companies, like any other entity trying to predict a nonlinear chaotic system, fail miserably from time to time, and they end up eating into their reserves.
4) The power companies, in coordination with state and local governments, have contingency plans in place that ensure there's enough energy left in the reserves to maintain critical and emergency services, even though it may mean halting delivery to all other customers.
5) In the meantime, the brokers at the power companies frantically try to buy extra energy from the brokerages. But it's a free market, and last-minute ergs cost much, much more than those bought with foresight. Further, it's a finite resource...if there's bad weather regionally or nationwide, there might not _be_ any excess to buy. So you're stuck depleting your reserves, and hoping the hospitals, police, and other infrastructure components don't go dark longer than their backup systems can cover.
It's common. And it's going to get worse in all major metropolitan areas over the next 10-20 years. Get used to it.
.@.
Well supply and demand work... but for people who have total control of the supply. I quite agree with you, as soon as electricity turns to a full capitalist system, then it is in electricity best interest to lower supply in order to make money.
Fortunately for the republicans, someday the USA will be so much deregulated that they won't have to do politics anymore as the country will be run by AOL-Time-Warner-Coca-Procter-Microsoft-Texaco (aka "World Company"). In what will be a capitalist paradise that Reagan and Bush would be proud of, laws will be made at the board meetings, the companies will have their own armies, police and schools. Citizens will have rights equal to their stock portofolio, and those who can afford will even have access to full medical services and police protection. The justice will be privatized, and in a perfect example of efficient free-market, the opposing sides will be able, during the trial, to bid on the judge to win the case.
Doh, one of my Linux boxes is up there in the Bay Area and it has an uptime of 123 days. It would have been up to 400+ days if it wasn't for those last 2 power outages and that RH6.0->6.2 upgrade :(
I'd recommend wiring one of these to your UPS when expecting long blackouts. Its a 12V, 125Ah marine battery and each one added should provide several hours of entertainment and lighting when the grid's out.
For sure, that's a great idea.
However, you don't need to specify marine batteries: Around here, Wal*Mart sells deep cycle batteries primarily meant for electric trolling (fishing) motors. They're off the shelf, relatively cheap (<$100) and will happily power an appropriate UPS.
If you can't find that, you can use a car battery, if need be. But a car battery doesn't like to be completely discharged; the plates are designed for short-duty high current use (starting the engine).
Deep cycle = best bet. Car battery = in a pinch.
If your UPS's existing battery has 6 cells (12V), this will work. If your UPS battery has 12 cells (24V), you'll need to put two batteries in series. If you want more battery time, put two (or more) batteries in parallel. Any good auto parts store will sell the cables and battery terminal posts. If you're mixing batteries, it's a very good idea to make sure that the batteries you connect together are identical and charged to the same level. Otherwise, you get into situations where one battery charges another.
Generators optional.Your car is a great way of replenishing the batteries if you've got a long blackout. Just remember that your alternator is not designed for use as a battery charger: if the battery is really dead, it's best to wait until the power is back on and use the real charger. And if you've got a bunch of batteries in parallel and they're all low, charge them one at a time: Alternators can be expensive to replace.
Another suggestion, which I built for my parents who were affected by the Great Ottawa Ice Storm a few years ago. A car battery, a 1970s GM internal regulator alternator, a Briggs and Stratton gas engine and one of those Statpower AC inverters (500 watt rated) - all screwed to a board - were able to provide enough power for them to use lights (sparingly) and be able to watch TV and stuff.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Ummm... I'm in Iowa and I wouldn't even know if all of CA went dark if it weren't for national news on the radio. There's too much pride and self centeredness in that statement. It should read something like 'we screwed up and are changing our policies, would you, other state, please help for 6 months?'
--- "1.21 Jigawatts!" -Doc
News Flash: Nobody outside your theme-park country gives a hoot.
Yet, the fact that so many 'mericans can be distracted by that sort of nonsense (and write stupid songs about it), is to a large degree why your country is so intensely messed up.
Happy trails, moron, and try cutting your LSD with some pot next time.
--And hats off to those who 'Get it.' The fight may be a losing one, but its not the winning that counts; it's the breaking out of the coma.
Awareness is everything.
-Fantastic Lad
I wouldn't sit a car battery right on my carpet. At least get one of those plastic battery cases to contain any acit that might leak out (esp while charging the battery).
A fast food tray is enough. I occasionally bring a cold battery in from outside to charge it. Theoretically, acid shouldn't leak out while you're charging - if it does, you're charging it too hard and the escaping hydrogen is pushing the acid out of the cells where it spills to the floor.
Having said that, batteries aren't always perfectly sealed, even with the caps on the cells...
If you hear your battery making noises like a frothy bubbling sound, stop charging: you're overcharging it. Be careful that the switch on the charger is *below* the battery, because the frothy bubbling is lighter-than-air and extremely flammable hydrogen. Do not smoke near the battery.
Make sure that wherever it is that you're charging the battery, you've got it well ventilated. I always wear a pair of safety glasses and keep a box of baking soda around just in case the battery blows up. And it does happen. It looks like the Hindenburg, only smaller, and shooting hot sulphuric acid around.
When you're using the battery, you can worry a little less about ventilation: they only give it off when they're being charged.
Remember that a lead-acid battery, however inelegant and unrefined they may be, packs a hell of a lot of energy in a small space. You don't want to release that energy without being careful how it's controlled. A good car battery can make a 1/4" diameter screwdriver shank glow bright cherry red in under 5 seconds. And I've seen an engineer lose a finger because the iron pinky ring that engineers wear got shorted across a car battery. Red hot iron ring around a finger = amputated finger.
Be careful and respectful of the power of a battery.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Ha ha ha aha ha ha ha hah ha ha ha ha ha
Ha ha ha aha ha ha ha hah ha ha ha ha ha
Ha ha ha aha ha ha ha hah ha ha ha ha ha
Serves you all right.
When did you last do anything for africa?
--------------------------------------------- "In the end, we're all just water and old stars."
I'm already doing that, thank you very much!
No halogens, half my house is 25W flourescent, I don't do Christmas lights, my computers are off at night when I'm not home, etc.
So, what's my next step? I still have to face the stupid power problems. What else can I do? I'm planning on replacing my windows with double paned low E versions, upgrading my ventilation with a HRV unit sometime. I can go as low as I want, but if that means everyone else starts to use it instead, I want a solution that helps to loosely couple me from the rest of the problems. A 24 hour energy cache would be marvelous, but I'm not sure that can even be accomplished!
So, what other suggestions do you have?
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
The UK already uses energy caches, a.k.a. pump-storage hydro schemes. They are incredebly expensive to build, are not very efficient, but work. Alas, they can only store a few minutes power at full output, and their only major advantage is that they can come on-stream in a few seconds (limited by the amount of time it takes for a large water column to fall through a mountain, I believe...)
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
The state de-regulated the power market for producers but kept the consumers in a artificial market with price ceilings. This caused scaricity. That is not deregulation.
I work in San Mateo (20 minutes south of SF), and we've been watching these all day. Our major systems are all ups'd, but it would still suck to be without power.....
--BlueLines "The cost of living hasn't affected it's popularity." -anonymous
Here's the article: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/12/national/12CALI. html
I'd recommend wiring one of these to your UPS when expecting long blackouts. Its a 12V, 125Ah marine battery and each one added should provide several hours of entertainment and lighting when the grid's out. Generators optional.
Yes, but not yet.
If we can mass-produce high-temperature superconducting wire, we can build your idealized energy storage device.
For large enough tanks of liquid nitrogen, I think we may actually be at that point - there are a couple of superconductor firms that are building prototypes of "generators" that are basically trailer-truck-sized tanks of superconducting coils. Load 'em up with power when it's cheap. Sit 'em in the yard, bleeding a small amount of current out of 'em to run the motors that keep the LN3 cool until a $DISASTER strikes. Drive 'em to the disaster site and plug 'em in.
(Of course, if there's ever a coolant leak while the things are fully-charged, get the hell outa dodge...)
Umm... you're worried about the grues? Just bring a lantern! (sorry, couldn't resist your .sig ;)
Burris
The point is that the electric plants are waaay more efficient than an internal combustion engine, so it's much cleaner in the long run to have the power generated there.
This is EXACTLY what America does, just think of each state as an individual country. America, as a whole, has plenty of power. California, by itself, does not. Stupid, dumbass regulators imposed a price freeze on how much power companies can sell electricity for, which is significantly below what they would have to pay to buy out of state electricity. As a result, California is out of power. The COUNTRY is not, just as Europe will probably never run out of power, but California is, because precisely as you said, from time to time we have to buy electricity from neighboring states.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
I don't know where you see anyone saying this - the point is that clean air is a public resource, and there is reason to prevent damage to it, even if individual rights are thus limited. If you have trouble grasping this concept, think of other forms of public property (say, a park) and the laws that prevent vandalism of that property.
Auto makers will be heavily fined if they don't meet the minimum percentage; however, I find it hard to believe that people are going to run out to buy electric cars if they won't be able to charge them whenever they need to(which will be quite often due to the limited range).
Just as my uptime was starting to get impressive too...
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
"You can lean towards Service to Others, or Service to Self. (And despite your protesting, it sounds to me as though you have a leaning toward 'Service to Others' behavior. Sorry, but I think of that as a 'good guy' trait.)"
The only real problem I see with this outlook is that it only takes one of those "All for me!" kinda people to bollix up the whole thing. If a person sees someone else benefitting from this 'good guy' action, and doesn't pass it on, it is human nature to lessen, and even eliminate, one's own 'positive' actions towards others.
I think a far superior situation would be one in which people concentrated on their own well-being, in order to make it unnecessary for others to 'help them' do anything. If people took a more self-centric view, and ensured that their own needs were taken care of by themselves, then everyone would be better off.
If there were people who needed genuine help, then people would be in a position to help them if they chose, and their own situations wouldn't be lessened by the assistance they gave.
A good example of this would be a person who had $100 to their name, and rather than using it to buy food, clothing, etc., they gave it to someone else because they perceived a greater 'need' in the other person. Does this action render null their own need for food, clothing, etc.? No, it just requires them to depend on the 'charity' of someone else, thereby lengthening the cycle unnecessarily.
Like I've told people before, it doesn't make sense for you to give up your last piece of bread to someone else, only to have to turn around and hold your hand out for someone else to give you their piece of bread. If you concentrate on your own realistic needs, you will have bread for yourself, and if you choose to give away a piece, you can do so.
Go read the National Review article on the subject. This is not caused by genuine deregulation.
I just hope these rolling blackouts won't be done in So-Cal. I'ts been near freezing here for the past couple nights, and cold and rainy during the day.
I've read countless stories that describe the downfall of western civilzation. They all have one thing in common (more or less): It all starts in a small way, first with rationing of electricity and water, first for few hours, then it will be whole days... Then public transport will break, more and more flights will be cancelled, goods will stop to be available in stores. Then there will be rioting (LA recently had one) etc. etc... ;)
And I'm only 1/2 joking!
J.
In my country (The Netherlands) several utility companies now offer two kinds of power: 'conventionally' generated and 'environmentally clean' power. The former is generated mostly by natural-gas fired plants, the latter is generated by wind/sun/tidal/etc. generators. The environmentally 'clean' power is a little more expensive, but that does not keep people from choosing this option. Why, you ask? Well, probably because people know that there are more ways to calculate the cost of energy besides tallying the electric bills. If you add up the EXTRA costs from environmental damage caused by traditional power plants (even natural-gas fired, relatively clean as they may be), you'll probably end up with higher costs than the 'environmentally friendly' generated power.
If you sign a contract with the utility company for 'natuurstroom' ('natural power'), they do not rewire your house so that the power actually comes from windmills etc. Instead, they guarantee that they will add to the amount of your power consumption in environmentally friendly power generation capacity in one form or another. Where I live (in the 'polder' (reclaimed land)) this probably means wind generators. Elsewhere, it might means a tidal power plant, etc.
Of course, you have to trust the utility to actually make good on their promises. The contract you sign is co-signed by the WWF (World Wildlife Fund), who are supposed to be a 'trusted third party' to alleviate any doubts you may have about the utility company (which is, after all, a purely commercial entity in The Netherlands...).
Maybe a system like this would work for environmentally-conscious California as well?
--frank[at]unternet.org
That kid I blasted one post up was just annoying me because he typified all those who, just because they can understand the logic on one side of an equation, seem to think said logic can and should work all on its own.
Liberalism when taken too far can cause just as much damage as any conservative platform.
It seems strange to me that people don't automatically understand this. --That there's nothing wrong with guiding a naturally competitive system with a liberal hand. Balance healthy, and imbalance always leads to sickness and eventually, death.
-Fantastic Lad
Big flywheel connected to diesel generator here (and were the IT department for a major manufacturing company). Power goes offline, flywheel keeps power going while it starts up the generator. Ive never noticed a power dip. Servers and IT support personell workstations will keep running.
(Yeah yeah, actually I think electric and hybrid vehicles are pretty cool... it's just that we'd be completely hozed, as opposed to just somewhat screwed, if the "targets" for ZEVs had actually been met...)
I haven't watched the Matrix in a while (even then, I don't know how accurate the numbers were) but how much energy does the human body put out?
Ah, the mandatory Slashdot liberal-bashing, anti-environmenal rant.
Well, congrats... your air and water still suck. Species are still going extinct. You put all your eggs on natural gas which is now drying up and prices skyrocketing,
Typical anti-environmentalist propaganda. Because a few environmental regulations that managed to squeeze by intense corporate lobbying and Republican opposition don't suddenly solve all the environmental problems in the world they should be repealed? Here's a question; what would the air quality be like without these emissions laws? Of course, the typical right-wing reaction to environmental problems has always been to a) spread FUD and personal attacks, and b) ignore the problem (what pollution?). They ignore the science, they ignore quality of life issues, all in an insane attempt to squeeze out a little bit more money for the corporations. The right has no environmental policy other than to pretend it doesn't exist. And natural gas is drying up? How come I haven't seen headlines to that effect? It would be a news item a lot more significant than California's energy shortages.
you're freezing your asses off and whining about power shortages, high prices, and rolling bloackouts.
Freezing? Yes, we all know what a tundra California is. And anyone "whining" about high prices has been doing it for a while, since the end-user pricing is set by the government.
(2) Blame deregulation for the energy shortage! Can't have liberals blaming their eco legislation or (gasp!) call for repealing some of it.
The "deregulation" involved freeing up the price utility companies pay the power generators; the cost to the end user is fixed by the government. Something which the utility companies fought for so they wouldn't have to risk actually seeing their prices go down to competition. Kind of backfired on them; they figured they'd make out better in the end if they didn't have to lower prices, and gambled that they wouldn't have the price they pay for the energy themselves shoot up. Of course the ultimate origin of the energy shortage is simply the fact that too many people are using it; logical thing would be to (gasp!) limit use, and since nobody seems to be too interested in doing that it has to be forced (i.e. blackouts). The bizarre thing is that companies who will obsess over every little expense their business runs up see nothing wrong in leaving the lights, air conditioning, and computers on all night when nobody's there.
Free tip for CA denizens: The Plan to steal your cars from you via smog regs is already well underway. Start fighting it now. Basically it combines (1) smog check rules DESIGNED TO FAIL A PERCENTAGE of cars (with an eventual goal of 97% of all cars over 10 years old) with (2) rules that make it ILLEGAL to keep an unregistered vechicle on your property. (1) + (2) = State power to STEAL YOUR CARS and crush them into cubes.
Are those capitalized words supposed to inspire shock and a surge of emotion? There is a terrible air pollution problem in California; the emissions standards are designed to alleviate this. Very few older cars may be able to pass these inspections. Whether your car's driving on your property or on the highways, it's still polluting a common resource; the air we breathe. Or would you accept it if someone moves next door to you and starts burning huge piles of tires 24 hours a day (why not? it's on his property!)
In the end, as much as the right tries to make it all sound like some secret conspiracy, auto emissions standards in California didn't just appear out of nowhere; they've been a topic of conversation for years, and the voters of California chose their representatives. This isn't some shadowy liberal plan; the majority of people there decided they wanted a cleaner environment, so they voted that way.
--
And now it come time to pay the piper and they start whining about it.
I can wish them a few good power outages so they can learn to power their electrical plants with environmentalists.
There's another great article about this on k5.
Burris
. In our zeal to keep America free of radioactivity,
really, damn frivolous people, wanting to avoid radiation... and toxic waste...
your look at this is way oversimplified -- your only mention of safety issues is during construction, it doesn't take into account any sort of accidents, any sort of long-term effects on the surrounding area, or the people that live in it.
there is far more at stake here than financial issues.
Can a energy cache be built and maintained?
Say, a ultra efficient flywheel that charges up at night(anytime, really, but at night when power is supposedly cheapest) and store energy for the household for the coming day?
Say, store X kWh.
Then, if X+b kWh is used, the next day start storing X+ b/2 at night.
And so on, iteratively.
If only X-d kWh is used, then only store X-d the next night. (This actually does decrease!)
X
X(we only charge X-d, but d is already in the system)
X-d(we only used X-d, so X-2d is charged...)
Anyway, gives us 1 day protection, and as the systems get more efficient, we can lengthen the charge period to, say a week, or a month, or whatever.
And if we want to, we can connect this to banks of solar cells, etc?
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
DANGER: DO NOT DO THIS UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING.
But if you're comfortable and know the basic safety precautions associated with line power, (and you've got nothing else to do that day) measure the voltage coming out of your socket every once in a while, and plot it on a graph.
Your "120VAC" isn't 120V all the time. The power companies know they can drop voltage to within the tolerances of most line-powered equipment, and will periodically do so in order to get the most bang for the buck. Better to take it to 115V and have 4% in reserve than to give the full 120V and have things fall apart when a steel mill goes online.
Judging from your report and the report of that student elsewhere in this article, they're having to push pretty hard. Betcha you're running somewhere around 110V. Maybe even a bit lower.
(Again, unless you know what you're doing, do not attempt to measure the voltage at your line socket. People who do stupid things with line voltage tend to get killed.)
ObGeekToy: It'd be cool if some company manufactured a device that plugs into an outlet and displays the outlet's voltage on an LCD display. Probably wouldn't cost more than $10 to build in quantity, and that's with UL approval. Target audience: Geeks ("Look and watch the voltage fluctuate during the day!") and people with generators ("So that's why my light bulbs keep burning out!").
It's due to privatization. The government-regulated system used to work pretty ok. Not perfectly, but pretty ok. The 30 (mostly small) municipally owned power companies in California still work ok. One of them is very large, Los Angeles's; this is selling power to the rest of the state, but of course doesn't have enough to power all of California. It's precisely the private companies that the juvenile Ayn Randians (sorry about the redundancy) have such wet dreams about that aren't able to deliver the goods. They are slurping up huge profits, though.
Not to be too cheeky here, but if I were a corporation I'm not sure I'd name my products after someone whose name is associated with spanking the monkey!
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
I drove by my neighborhood Safeway tonight and they were using emergency generators to keep their coolers cool. The rest of the shopping plaza surrounding Safeway was completely dark.
Last night my power was off from 12:45 to 2:15. (Hooray for my UPS!)
I live in San Rafael, CA, 15 miles north of San Francisco, and blackouts are real.
Yeah, sure, that "interruptible power" scheme works great if you are a manufacturing facility turning out a few million bucks' worth of product a day. Or a commercial bank. Or the local RBOC. Or Amazon.com...
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
My wife and I live in San Diego. During the day the only thing running is the computer and the fridge. We have been trying to keep our power consumption low. It will stink if we loose power, cause my server will go down. (its a 586.)
Where I work we are shutting down all the desktops now. During the day we are only using half the overhead lights to cut power.
Microsoft aggravates my tourettes syndrome.
In Williston, ND, a park near the downtown area is lit up brightly every December and early January with elaborate designed etched in Christmas lights. However, the city can't afford to run those lights and all its street lights at the same time, so it randomly turns out the lights over a different part of town every night for the whole year to recoup the loss.
Here in San Diego, we have the privilege of both exhorbitant rates and the prospect of blackouts. The manner in which energy was 'deregulated' (it wasn't, but that's a topic left for another time) meant that when a utility paid off its old debt, it could then pass thru its true costs to the customer. San Diego Gas and Electric was the first to effect a payoff, and we now pay the full freight. Where we were before paying around 3 cents per KWH, the price on the spot market has gone to as high as $2.50 at times. My last bill averaged out at 21 cents per KWH, about 7 times the rate of before, and I expect the next one to be a multiple of that. The real cost is masked by an emergency bill that was rushed thru the legislature capping the rate charged to me at around 6 cents. However, each bill shows an 'adjustment' (an accumulating debt that somebody, i.e. probably me, is going to end up paying eventually). Businesses are closing, people are getting laid off, and most everyone is shutting off every power consuming device they can. The entire state is facing an economic crisis. And today in the Los Angeles Times, there's a story about how the new budget just passed assumes continuing economic prosperity. The state budget has increased 43% in 3 years. The governor in his state-of-the-state speech seemed to favor CA condemning power plants under eminent domain and then running them itself. That plus apparently sending invading armies to border states to force them to sell us power (or at least that's how it sounded). If you're holding any California bonds in your portfolio, I'd be dumping them now.
Here's an article with some actual analysis and facts around the issue.
F S= California+Screaming+under+Gov%27t+Blows
"The so-called free market in electric power in California consists of the fact that, last summer, price controls were removed from the power supplies of San Diego County and the southern portion of adjacent Orange County, while remaining in force throughout the rest of the state. "
http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=575&
Fuck yer mover..... in her raas.... (Mr. Wong)
I live in a very old and very beautiful third world city. Maybe you've heard of it, San Francisco?
Thanks to our Mayor and District Attorney, drugs and prostitution are de facto legal. The only thing that sells better in this city than Mary J. Wanna is computer stuff. I know what you are thinking... "What a heaven on earth."
We have 40,000 homeless. I saw one man pulling five carts full of junk around strung alone two ropes. I expect to see a camel caravan soon. At sunset, when the light is just right, it actually looks like Tatooine.
Now I will go jump on my electric power scooter, zig zag around people dressed in tarps, covered with tatoos, and adorned facially in steel. I will cruise to the Starbuck's Coffee, Tully's Coffee, Modern Thai, Thai Navy, and Thai Spice. My people will be there.
Incidently, there are far more Thai restaurants in San Francisco than fast food restaurants combined. In reality, there are more Thai restaurants in San Francisco than any other city on the planet. I will bet big money, that Thailand does not have as many Thai resaurants per capita. I think a recent scientific study from the University of California at San Francisco asserted that it's to feed all the Asian sex slaves at the Oriental Massage parlours.
Between you and me. The Thai restaurants are really good. Viva Than Franthithcowoo!
Well, congrats... your air and water still suck.
:)
:)
I was watching the Daily Show (font of news that it is
and they had a segment. Apparently Huston has finally passed L.A. as the city with the worst air polution. Thank you George W.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Measuring line voltage doesn't take an engineering degree. Take a multimeter from radio shack, turn it to the proper AC voltage range, stick the probes in. It really is that simple.
--
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Refreshed by a brief blackout, I got to my feet and went next door.
But one's outlook in this regard is an elastic one. You can lean towards Service to Others, or Service to Self. (And despite your protesting, it sounds to me as though you have a leaning toward 'Service to Others' behavior. Sorry, but I think of that as a 'good guy' trait.)
In any case, if everybody did volunteer work, (as you have done), then communities would thrive and life would be made easier and more comfortable for everybody to pass through. If, however, everybody approached life from a, "All for me! Fuck sharing!" attitude. . , well, you end up with a much shittier, much more competitive world to live in. -A world, where most people are mostly miserable. A competitive society is like the lottery; while there are some who attain vast benefit, most don't.
As for government forcing you to give to the community?
Well, the government, (even in Canada) is deeply, deeply flawed, but I don't see how regulating gas prices so that society experiences a uniform level of fairness and comfort forces you into a negative situation. All it does is hinder the leeches from diverting wealth and accumulating power. It's too bad that this system of regulation is on its way out up here. Canada is going to die an ugly death fairly soon as well. We'll just be a decade or so behind the U.S.
-Fantastic Lad
You mean you don't HAVE a lead-acid, heavy as hell, noisily beeping, hooked-to-your-serial-port, set-to-shutdown-your-computer, UPS?
What kind of geek ARE you?!
I've seen an enormous number of references to blackouts and brownouts over the last few years while reading Linux UPS docs and Slashdot... and it makes me really wonder what's going on over in our former colonies that Mad George lost ;-)...
The only time I've ever saw blackouts in the United Kingdom is when
So far, I think I've experienced a power-cut about three times while living in England, and twice in France.
Both times in France, it was due to storms:
It seems to me that the Californian problem is quite simple, really. A combination of:
How about a two-fold solution:
If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
As a personal note, I'm glad to hear this. I have to leave work at midnight. My building is on 17th and Mission. I'm sure anyone familiar with SF can understand why I'm not eager to walk thru this neighborhood in the dark.
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
I, for one, work in a place where we study electricity deregulation as enivronmental policy. Basically, the california power shortage is attributable to a number of factors, NONE OF WHICH ARE ENVIRONMENTAL LEGISLATION.
The state decided to "de-regulate" the power industry. Unfortunately, they forgot to de-regulate the prices. That's right, they were forcing companies to supply electricity at a fixed price, whether it be too high or too low. Now, a couple of plants went down for boiler maintainance. This is a big, big deal and takes a while. So, as the demand for electricity was rising, the price was set at a constant level, thus, companies had no incentive to start planning ahead for the days (now) in which they would not have enough power (They could have contracted to buy from out-of-state).
THE LESSON: Don't "de-regulate" like California did (duh!). Other states, like Pennsylvania, have done it without problems. What did they do? They gradually removed regulation, step-by-step, rather than taking it away all at once. You can't expect an industry which has previously existed only under a regulated environment to adapt instantly.
AS FOR YOUR ENVIRONMENTAL ASSERTIONS, they are generally incorrect. Check out the DOE energy information agency website. (http://www.eia.doe.gov). They have done some really, really interesting research, including studies which have shown, when including the cost of pollution, that natural gas power plants, the type all over Cali, are THE LOWEST COST TYPE. Yeah, coal looks like its cheaper, but coal plants spew rediculous amounts of No2 into the environment.
The natural gas supply is not "drying up"; the distribution system is simply stretched. The same thing happened to gasoline production (and thus prices) this summer.
As for your political views, they are obviously uninformed, much like your general knowledge of the power industry or of environmental issues. How could the legislature in California vote to build more power plants if the industry has been privatized? Sounds to me like you just wanted to complain about democrats.
However, thank you for reinforcing my closely-held assertion that all conservatives are stupid, selfish, or both. Someday I will have to study that scientifically....until then...
EAT A DICK
"Chill, Orrin!"---Trent Lott
But we can thank Mr. Anonymous Coward for volunteering to prove the point. He can still win in the bonus round if he can answer me this:
I stated things above which are far more open to question than which penis was where, but instead, he reacted only when the tabloid nonsense of his world didn't line up properly. Ask yourself why.
Thank you. You may now go back to your seat.
-Fantastic Lad.
And if you have a decent UPS (such as the APC Smart-UPS) it can give you a perty graph of your input voltage. They even have a version of the software for Linux.
Therefore, because CA is taking their power from other states (to charge their "green cars", etc), they are just dumping their pollution problem onto other states to deal with. And now that they have the Feds invovled, the other states power plants MUST give them power.
HTH, HAND
Hooptie
"Heavens, it appears that my weewee has been stricken with rigor mortis!" -- Stewie Griffin
The problem with nuclear power isn't that it's unsafe, in fact it seems to be quite a bit safer than burning coal, but that when an accident happens it has the potential to cause a very large number of problems all at once. The problem is therefore mainly one of perception, in a way it's quite similar to airline travel. Many people are nervous about traveling on an airline despite the fact that air travel is quite a bit safer than travel by private vehicle. This is because people are used to traveling along the ground but they are not used to traveling in the air. In addition, airliners tend to put a few hundred people in the same place at the same time so that when there is an accident (as will happen with any human endevor) it does a lot more damage (and therefore is reported on the news) than an accident in a private vehicle which probably only involves 5 people at the most. In a similar way, people are used to setting things on fire for energy, we've been doing that for thousands of years and it's just not all that scary to us anymore, on the other hand fission is a new and kind of scary thing. In addition, fission accidents tend to be disasters and put thousands of people at risk all at once while the by products of coal burning kill people very slowly and over a very long period of time.
_____________
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
Computers and severs are now major appliances
in many houses and offices. In total they
consume 15% of the US energy supply and account
for most of the US energy usage increase since
the 1980s. Some server farms are measured in
megawatt consumption according to a recent
Newsweek article.
Doesn't need to be that way. Laptop technology
knows how to keep computing energy to a few watts
per workstation.
UPDATE: The California Independent System Operator
has downgraded Thursday's Stage Three power
emergency to a Stage Two emergency, ending the
threat of rolling blackouts across the Bay Area.
You have no idea what your talking about.
Dude, he's right on all counts, unfortunately. I detest the Republicans because while I'm a fiscal conservative, I'm also a social liberal. And a lot of the Democrats environmental platform is just simply dangerous, in that it causes problems like rolling blackouts and erodes one's freedom to drive (or even possess!) the vehicle of his/her choice.
Having said that, they're not completely to blame, Cash for Clunkers and other misguided concepts were pioneered by Republicans as ways for their big oil friends to appear to be doing something for the environment.
BTW, it's "you're", as in a contraction of "you are". "Your" is possessive.
First, you should not confuse the "not in my backyard" folks with the enviromentalists. These are two almost totally unrelated groups who want almost totally diffrent things, i.e. the "not in my backyard" people will be quit happy to see the power plant to go in the ecologically importent swamp in the next county..Effectively, though, environmentalists *are* all too often the same thing, simply by virtue of their shortsightedness.
For example, Western European environmentalists scored a big win: they managed to basically kill the nuclear power projects in Western Europe. Western Europe's electricity is now mostly made from natural gas.
One of the world's biggest suppliers of natural gas is Russia. So, Russia sells as much of their natural gas as they can to Western Europe. In order to ensure that the natural gas is available for sale, Russia shuts down their gas power plants and fires up a couple of mothballed RBMK reactors to produce their own power.
Now, which would you rather have, the running Western European reactor three miles from your house, or a running Russian RBMK flammable-moderator reactor in the Ukraine?
Chernobyl was an accident with profound world-wide environmental consequences. While operator error was at fault, Russian reactor design contributed hugely to the severity of the accident. In a French reactor, for example, it would have been a note in the operating log and a fired employee, nothing more.
a) I think breaderbreEder
reactersreactOrs
make very clean nukes and no enviromentalists are objecting to these things (they have a small problem that the millitarymiLitary
must monitor them since they produce high grade plutonium).Breeder reactors are a great idea. Like solar power. Like tidal power. Like wind power. However, these aren't computers. Things change at an incremental pace; nuclear power (and power plants in general, which are primarily about mechanical engineering) is a relatively mature technology. Don't expect quantum leaps.
As it is, breeders are inefficient. Perhaps that's the wrong term since they actually *create* fuel while they consume it, but for the dollar investment and for the quantity of fuel in the core, they really can't be harnessed to produce a hell of a lot of heat. Heat, of course, boils water which spins turbines and therefore generators.
b) Solar is very cost effective if you allow the companies to charge more for it *and* require people to pay for it when the company provides it.So you want to undermine the free market economy and force people to buy something that is more expensive when there's a cheaper alternative? I thought you'd just said solar was cost effective?
For the record, it's not. It requires vast quantities of land where you *will* kill the ecosystem, large investments in solar cells, storage batteries (solar doesn't produce power off moonlight, you know) and inverters (solar cells put out DC, the electric grid requires AC to function).
You just need to pass a law which requires people to pay the additional costs for solar AND pay the company and extra 1% or 2% profit on top (multiplied by the percentage of the power which is solar).Sure!
I propose a law that we force everyone who has ever been a member of any environmentalist group to have to buy electricity *exclusively* from power sources that they have pushed into existance.
Don't get used to cold beer, it ain't gonna happen too often in your fridge.
Finally, it was deregulation and not enviromental regulations which prevented plants from being built. The companies felt they could delay building new plants to save money.Yes, and no. Unfortunately, the environmental regulations make it so expensive that the energy companies didn't feel building new plants was a worthwhile investment.
Admittedly, the fault was on both sides.
Also, who cares that CA is forcing people to replace their cars?I care.
I love old cars. I want to be able to drive the car of my choice. And I want to be able to get parts for my old car.
How can you ask "who cares"? It's an erosion of personal freedom. Of liberty. Even if you're not interested in cars, even with your apparently mediocre intelligence, you should see this as a first step down a dangerous path.
The bigger the monitor, the more energy it consumes. I propose that we not allow anyone Internet access if their monitor is bigger than 15". Further, I suggest that if we see a 17" monitor on someone's property, even though they can't get on the Internet with it anymore, we confiscate it and destroy it.
Concerned yet? This is exactly what is being done with cars and old car fans.
That is a great idea and very few of the current cars will live for 10 years anyway.Yeah, maybe the fact that cars aren't built the way they used to be is part of the reason why I like old cars.
If I'm shelling out $20,000+ for *anything*, you'd better bet your ass that I expect it to last.
Hell, all the eco-friendly cars are cheaper to run (those saturn electric cars cost like 1/4th as much as a good gas car),Until you have to replace the batteries.
Sadly, they also have about 1/4 of the drivability. And 1/4 of the range. And if you think a gas engine is hard to start when it's cold, just you wait until you're wanting to go to work and all your batteries are frozen.
And what about California's power problems? I can't wait to see the rolling blackouts when millions of commuters are plugging in battery-powered cars to recharge them.
Environmentally, too, you have to remember that a battery, by its very definition, is full of nasty, caustic and toxic chemicals. The more efficient the battery, the more nasty its ingredients are. And an electric car will be packed full of them. Every fender-bender on the freeway will result in a Haz-Mat team being called out to clean up the electrolyte before it trickles down storm sewers. Chemical burns will be a routine part of every car accident. And when these cars start to wear out and get scrapped, you're not going to get all the batteries back. Some will end up in lakes, and streams, and hiding in the pile of crap in my neighbor's back yard, etc.
so making everyone buy one will mean that the price must drop.Okay. I'm the government. Your computer is taking too much energy. So, we're going to force you to spend $6,000 on this energy-efficient 486SLC-33.
Man, I hope you're never allowed to vote anywhere. You're as fascist as Hitler.
Who knows maybe I will be able to buy a cheap eco-friendly car on the east cost in a few years.Maybe, yes. And I hope you can. But I also think that the free market economy will provide it, not government regulation.
Anyway, no one will sit arround for rolling blackouts. The government will pay for new plants and (hopefully) the power company officials will go to jail.For being intelligent businessmen and doing the best they could with the situation created by the laws that had been passed?
Wow, the mass exodus of businesses from your little piece of the world would be staggering.
Wanna pay the taxes to build those new plants? That'll be a neat trick once you've used the threat of jail time to drive the economy away.
Who knows maybe they will just export the socialist power from LA to the rest of the state.Ah, yes. Socialism works *so* well, as has been proven time after time in countries as diverse as Russia, Cuba, Bulgaria, East Germany, China... And *all* those countries, wonderful socialist goverments that they have/had, are *so* well known for their *excellent* treatment of the environment.
Your short-sightness and flagrant disregard for reality - neigh, common sense! - simultanously upsets, distresses, scares and even amuses me.
You, sir, are an idiot.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
this is another reason I like Nebraska . Link provided by Everything2.com. Isn't it a wonderful place?
... and I haven't seen any evidence of any power loss at all. During the entire "energy crisis", my APC's not even hinted to a load drop, much less a complete loss of power.
Now, while Alameda doesn't use PG&E power (we have our own company, Alameda Power & Telecom), still, none of my friends in PG&E territory have reported power loss at all.
There is a terrible air pollution problem in California; the emissions standards are designed to alleviate this.
There is a terrible energy crisis in California. What I propose is designed to alleviate this. Read on.
Very few older cars may be able to pass these inspections.Very few 17" or greater monitors use as little energy as a 15" monitor.
Whether your car's driving on your property or on the highways, it's still polluting a common resource; the air we breathe.Whether your monitor is being used to surf the web or for kernel-bashing, it's still using excess energy on a common resource, the electrical grid.
Therefore, I propose that we have a law that bans people from being able to connect to the Internet if they have a monitor bigger than 15".
Further, as the next phase of the program, I propose that if we *see* a 17" or bigger monitor in someone's home, we remove it from their property because destroying these energy wasting and inefficient big monitors will serve the greater good.
Scared yet? This is *exactly* what is done to those of us who love and cherish old cars. Even if you have no interest in old cars, you've got to realize what a profound and dangerous reduction in personal freedoms this is.
I'm all for clean air. That's why I maintain my vehicles well. Old vehicles don't count for a huge percentage of the miles travelled. Old age, wear and accidents control the quantities of old vehicles on the road quite effectively as it is, and without an erosion of your freedom or mine.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I seem to remember that as well, but I think they were brownouts where I live, about 20 minutes outside of baltimore. I just remember being about 14, and pissed because our lights had enough power to come on but I couldnt boot my machine and get on to the InfiNetwork BBS.
Assuming, of course, that I know what Im talking about.
Did you just grab my ass?
Of course I haven't gotten around to enabling power management because I want remote access to my system.
Also I haven't gotten around to measuring my ether switch or cable modem yet. So the computer equiment should be using a bit more. Also those measurements were for a particular usage pattern which might have changed when I moved. dianeFirst of all, most of the general public, except those living in CA, are unaware of any imepending energy crisis. By the time the rest of the US realizes that there is not enough generating capacity, it will be too late.
Secondly, most utilities are building new generating plants, but they are natural gas fired peaking plants. I see a couple of problems with this. They are building these plants because they are cheap (about 1/3 to 1/4 what a new coal or nuclear plant costs), are quick and easy to build (they can many times be brought in on semi-trailers and usually only need ~20 people to operate a 700MW plant), and all you have to do to site them is build transmission lines and a couple gas lines to supply the plant. The problem is that natural gas plants are enormously expensive to operate because of the price of natural gas. There is a natural gas shortage, yet the power industry keeps building these natural gas-fired plants. Hmmm... Does this not sound illogical to anyone else but me?
Thirdly, ALL fossil plants produce HUGE amounts of pollution. Coal plants produce almost every type of air pollution you can think of. True, they filter and scrub much of it out of the exhaust, but the stuff that they filter is still pollution, it just isn't in the air anymore. Also, coal and natural gas plants produce ALOT of CO2 and NOx's. Has anyone kept up with the Kyoto Protocols? We have to REDUCE our CO2 production in order to comply with them if they ever become ratified.
Finally, it is time we became a little more educated and a little less afraid of things that we don't quite understand. Nuclear power is virtually pollution free (nuclear fuel stays onsite, as does all of the detectable radiation), it is safe (much more so now due to Three Mile Island, amazingly stringent training and regulations, and new advanced-yet-much-simpler designs from GE, CE, and other makers of nuclear systems), and much easier-cheaper to build. The new designs are pre-licensed by the NRC, are modular (all the plants would be exactly the same and built using modules constructed off-site in tightly regulated QA facilities), and simpler (they employ passive, rather than active, emergency cooling using natural forces such as gravity and natural convection which allows the reactor to cool with no electricity available to power safety related components. These new plants have less than 25% piping, valves, and pumps found in current generation nuclear plants.
EEI news reported on Thursday that it now costs less to operate a nuclear power plant than it does to operate a coal-fired or natural gas-fired plant. This is the first time that nuclear power costs have been less expensive than coal since before the mid-80's, when new safety systems and regulations more than doubled its cost.
I have always said that the only way to convince people that nuclear power is still a viable (and ecologically attractive) power source was to cut off their power and cause them to think about where there power comes from. CA, and many other states in the US, want electricity, but they don't want any new power plants (of any type) built (at least not near them), they don't want the pollution (what about nuclear?), they don't want to pay more (forget buying from out of state generators), and want low prices and high reliability. Sorry, but everyone has to make sacrifices. Either you produce your own power, live in the dark with that beautiful skyline outside your city, or build new generating capability outside of town, get good reliable power, and pay less. I can't speak for everyone, but I know what I would do.
Oh, and for the comments about fuel cells - fuel cells need hydrogen. What is our hydrogen source? Natural gas. Where are you going to get your natural gas and how much are you going to pay? It is 4x last year's cost now, and fuel cells are NOT cheap. I would like to have one, but I couldn't afford the gas bill, no matter how much electricity I could produce and sell.
The bad news is that Southern California Edison just plastered our doors two days ago with a notice of a 30% rate increase. The good news is that there has been no news of rolling blackouts in our neck of the woods. The best news is that a new power plant has been approved - a wind farm! Its unfortunate that it takes a self-imposed crisis like this to get people to start thinking seriously about conserving what energy we have and using alternative energy sources for the future.
Article on approved wind farm
Speaking as someone living in San Francisco and working in Santa Clara (45 mile commute each way by motorbike) - the power shortage has so far not resulted in blackouts, intentional or otherwise. This is fortunate since the weather is inclement (by local standards) at present and most homes here are not as well insulated as they should be. An absence of power to run the heating systems would really suck. Hopefully the situation will at last focus the attention of people around here on the need to conserve energy.
Apart from the possibility of encouraging more responsible use of energy in the future the situation isn't too good. Just about the quickest way to put a dent in the Bay Area's high-tech. economy would be to pull the plug on it's electrical power supply.
The really annoying aspect to this situation is the way that the utility customers and/or tax payers look like being called upon to bail out the power utilities responsible for this mess in the first place.
Here we have two utilities that are whining about impending bankrupcy because they're being forced to buy power on the short-term market at ruinous prices, because they're forbidden to enter in to long term contracts.Well, when deregulation happened years ago the law was set up with the intention of encouraging the utilities to build their own damn power stations rather than relying on the ability to buy out of state power cheaply. With this in mind they were allowed to use the short-term market to fill gaps in production but were specifically restricted from using long-term contracts so that they would have to build power stations of their own in order to secure the majority of the state's supply. Only an idiot, the thinking went, would choose to rely on the volatile spot market as a long term strategy.
Unfortunatly, the boards of the utilities while not neccessaraly idiots were as short-term and greedy in their thinking as those of most other corporations and like those of almost any publicly-traded company in the '90s they thought only about the immediate stock price. They rapidly figured out that if they built as few power stations as possible and invested as little as possible in the power distribution infrastructure they could shovel all the 'spare' money into boosting the stock price. So, they did. And they bought power on the spot market to cover up the fact that they weren't doing their job.
Now the spot market price has risen drastically the utilities are stuck with the consequences of their own actions. Except, of course that they aren't stuck with them at all - that buck will be passed to consumers and taxpayers, very few of whom ever saw any benifit from the rises in the utility stock prices that they involentaraily funded but almost all of whom have over the past few years experienced the frequent unscheduled outages caused by the failure of the undermaintained infrastructure.
To add insult to injury, the consumers and taxpayers will be bailing out utilities who's near bankrupcy was hasted by recent transfers of a significant chunk of their funds from the utilities to the safety of their parent companies.
In short, this is a classic and rather blatent example of modern capitalism in action; the profits are privatised (the utilities get to keep all of those) but the costs are socialised - the public gets to bail them out.
On the bright side this fiasco does at least look like it might get the power industry in California re-regulated. It's becoming apparent even to the hard-of-thinking that the industry, like most others, can't be trusted to operate in a deregulated manner.
Shamballa Jones - still can't log in
Unfortunately, 'standard of living' is not something which can easily be compared numerically. I can produce just as many statistics showing that you're better off in .uk.
Flamebait???
:)
This is straightforward, mainstream economics. I'm sorry if the laws of supply and demand offend you, but they cannot be suspended, notwistanding the semi-regular attempts of the california legislature.
Then again, maybe a CA legislature picked up some moderation points
Hehe.. Just answer me this:
If YOU had to choose between one of the following, which would it be.
1) Live without any electricity in your home for the rest of your life
_or_
2) Have a species of salamnders, unique to a wetlands near you, go extinct.
It's easy for everybody to whine about how others are killing the environment. But all the environmentalists I know in CA still drive around in their SUVs.
The reason the power companies in CA are buying power on the spot market is because the CA goverment PROHIBITED them from having short/long term contracts!
I just hope my power stays on long enough to post on Slashd
It was rolling brownouts, not blackouts, at least in DC. [And that was the same summer that the DC water treatment system kept going ass-up, and my university was giving everyone rations of bottled water.]
Of course, our area never got hit by the brownouts, which made me even more pissed that I had shut everything off and wasn't mudding. [I think that was the last time that I painted any of my WH40k models]
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
So i am guessing that all the folks down in the hosted web services space are getting pretty carefull with power!!! Lets see if our webservers stay up when the power is gone!!! Locally we are just going to take a day off (hence i am rooting for a brownout)... now if only it was not raining soo hard!!!!
Non-Deterministic Finite Automata
I don't think Canada has this problem. Reactors are built by the government, so the only financial risk is to the taxpayaers. Government investors don't mind losing money, they can always print more.
Even though the blackouts have been called off for now, it's pretty tough to look at all the facts and not realize that energy corporations in Texas and Oklahoma have set this whole thing up to rape California.
Granted, California's idiot policies opened the door for them, but just cuz your neighbor is bending over doesn't mean it's an invitation for the humpty dance.
Wholesale energy costs up 25%, California's cost to buy electricity (from the plants it built and once owned) up 700%, and the corporations in Oklahoma and Texas have skyrocketing stock prices and profits.
Well, piss on them. When my state of california gets on top of this, your gonna pay, bastards.
Public infrastructure cannot be properly served by this ridiculous sham of a "free market".
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
I don't think British Columbia is polluting the entire planet. Even if everyone in BC owned their own smog factory, it wouldn't amount to much.
Being an employee and former student of a university in New Jersey, we generate our own power as we have a steam-based electric plant on-campus. Only one block of dorms has non-campus power, and that's nothing we have to worry about as it was purchased from the town. Maybe some California schools should start in on their own power plants and tke the load off the grid.
--
Uhm, gee sparky, lets do the math. Is anyone suprised that there might be a problem with atitudes like those above? Lets try to be a LITTLE bit sensible. AND by the way, the CA power situation was PARTIALLY deregualted. So saying that the free market is the problem is not entirely correct, saying that deregualtion is the problem is not entirely correct. Sayint that stupidity and ingnorance is the problem would be correct.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
... not to mention how the reserves were already tapped because of the many man hours and cups of java that had to be brewed...
its a conspiracy, cant you see?
Sun owns stock in all of the energy distributors.
How else can you explain their servers power consumption! You dont see Sun buying stock in Transmeta do you? Hell no, because they want you to use/buy all the power you can, and they want to own that power!
For Chrissake, the name of the company is Sun!!
Did you just grab my ass?
This can not be blamed on Republicans. The Democrats have had a choke hold on the California legislature for decades. The GOP controlled the legislature in 1994 for about 10 minutes before Willie Brown outmaneuvered them and regained control.
When this legislation was passed the California Senate and Assembly were fimrmly under the control of the Democrats, as they both continue to be. The vast majority of stupid legislation passed in California has the fingerprints of the Democratic party all over them.
There was a Republican Governor when these poorly thought out laws were passed in 1996. So he certainly shares some blame. But everybody knows where legislation is written (do I need to say it... in the legislature). Most of California's top politicians are likely complicit in this idiotic scheme. The current Governor Gray Davis was Lieutenant Governor at the time. I do not recall him saying anything about how dumb this suppossed deregulation was at the time. So where the hell was he?
Actually, many heavy industrial polluters simply include pollution files in their normal operating cost budget. So I guess it is OK for the rich to pollute.
Only poor people need to stay clean.
Actually, with truly market driven anti-pollution laws, an enterprising poor person could stay very clean and then sell his pollution credits to the rich. In this way the clean person would be compensated for his efforts.
I got tired of reading everyone else's dumb-ass comments and disagreeing, so now I will tell you what I think. I don't really have any professional qualifications on power systems, only a year of college economics, but I do dabble a bit so I have a bit of knowledge.
I'd like to know where that guy who said that it takes more energy to create a photovoltaic cell than it will ever produce, heard this. I have never heard this claim before and doubt it.
Solar Cells do not have a terribly short life if treated well. They are rated for 25 years, and will often perform much longer. Since they are modular, those parts that fail (rather than a system-wide gradually degradation) can be replaced.
Photovoltaics are expensive. Current new, retail pricing is about $4/watt for the cells. You still need control & distribution, and storage. It does get expensive. I think that the control that ones gets by being 'off the grid' is worth it.
Solar Cells aren't just for the sun-shine states. There's a lot more energy in grey skies than you may think. And cells actually perform BETTER in cold weather!
Photovoltaics DO require expensive, hi tech factories for production. I don't know about the pollution created but imagine there is some.
Wind power is much more low-tech. It's possible create your own wind-power system out of everyday parts, if you have a bit of mechanical skill.
Like photovoltaics, there is an additional control, distribution, and storage cost.
There is, obviously, places where the air is too still for wind power to be effective. Luckily, I live in an area (New England) which is pretty windy. Coastal and off-shore areas are good, as are many mountains.
The problem with wind power is the height required to get the best wind is over 100 feet. 130 foot towers are common. These are expensive. The cost can be mitigated by using the towers for other, secondary uses such as antennas, flag poles, weather stations, observation towers.
If that weren't enough of a problem, there is the zoning regulations that make it imposible to put up large enough towers for either aesthetic or aviation reasons. The NIMBY effect comes into play here. We need enabling legislation to allow towers for wind power where they make sense, over-riding local regulations.
Hydro is a great source of power. Unlike solar and wind, hydro has its own built-in energy storage when using a dam (let as much water through the gates as you need). The move towards larger and larger hydro projects is, however, flooding vast areas of land, displacing many people and wildlife. Maybe smaller projects, or non-dam projects, should be used in many instances.
tidal power is another type of hydro. Most people don't know this, but the very expensive part of Boston's downtown known as Back Bay was once water, and the tidal energy was harnessed to operate a mill. I believe that tidal power has not recieved the attention it deserves. The possibilities are great (imagine if we could tap the energy of the tides in the Bay of Fundy!)
I don't know much about geothermal, because it isn't really feasable anywhere near me, I haven't explored it. I know it works well in Iceland.
I don't think that Nuclear is a good idea, because humans just aren't competent enough to run them. Even if we were, there's still the waste problem.
California is a car dependant state, like most of the US. A car is an economic neccessity in the US, and should be treated as such. I don't think that the agressive destruction of older cars is acceptable, from either the economic or personal property rights perspective. Instead of trashing old cars, maybe special mufflers could be developed for them, to make emissions less. If fuel economy is the issue, how about a luxury tax on SUVs and other gas gobblers that aren't neccessary? Most of these SUVs don't even go off road. I'd say anyone living in a city & its suburbs should be taxed for their SUV. People who actually need such off-road ability, those in the country, should not have to pay this tax. (most of these supposed SUVs really suck off road from what I hear. You'd be better off with a jeep or a subaru 4wd).
The energy crisis in California is the fault of the people, the state government, and the federal government. It is the fault of both the democrats and the Republicans alike. California needs conservation, alternative energy, and also needs new plants. Deregulation has been a failure, not just in california but around the country (here in Boston my rates just doubled!). The whole world has to be more aware of the resources we have and their distribution. How many times have we paniced at the actions of OPEC, made all these promises to be Good Little Consumers, and then slid back into wasteful, careless sloppyness when the pressure was off? I remember twice in the 1970s when it was quite bad. How much do we need bigger, faster, more? On my recent trip to Houston I was disgusted by the waste I saw there. I have never considered myself a 'hippie' or 'tree hugger' and would cringe at the label 'environmentalist', but there's really got to be a limit to the gluttony that places like Houston and Las Vegas have. These places make me ashamed to be an American.
Let's all try to be a little bit more aware of the limits of resources. I am not suggesting that we give up all the benefits of the 21st century. But please consider walking if you can, consider taking a train, consider buying a car that gets at least 20 miles to the gallon, consider not leaving that 21 inch monitor on all the time. And, like your mom said, turn off the lights when you leave the room!
Stripping is not why SF strippers are famous. Think manually.... -Nate
They're actually doing that now. The poster in San Diego (a few posts before yours) for instance has already been hit with ridiculously high rate increases. S/he wasn't kidding about people going out of business, either, I saw a story on that on the news a few weeks ago. Our rates (a few hundred miles north of San Diego) will go up 30% soon (just announced by our utility.) You make a good point about the companies - I see individuals making an effort around the office (not turning on their desk lights, shutting down the computers at night, etc.) but upper management hasn't said a word yet. I would think that something like this would prompt a corporate request to conserve, (but then we're a 150-person office who just implemented a recycling program LAST WEEK - sickening - so I suppose I can't expect too much of them.)
At a household level, that 30% increase is going to prompt conservation. The reason that you asked for re: why they haven't done so sooner is that when the electric was deregulated, there was a mandated freeze on the rates for a given length of time. San Diego's time expired first and they were the first to get hit with the increases - now the clock has run down for us and its our turn.
California will recover from this (remember the Carter years?) Meanwhile those of us living here need to turn the lights off and power down the computers - this isn't just about high utility rates, its about whether there's enough power in the grid to keep a family's heat on in the middle of winter. With so many power plants down (3 were shut down for routine maintenance last year and it sounds like several more have gone down since the storms started this week,) every little bit will help.
Totally true. In fact, that's how I do it all the time. I just didn't wanna get sued if someone's fingers happened to be holding onto the wrong part of the lead when they tested it... especially if they had one lead in each hand!
Consider this: Java is such a slow, bloated virtual machine enviornment that it requires at least twice the CPU horsepower and memory to run the same applications written in a language such as C++.
Unfortunately many companys bought into Sun's lies about Java and implemented Java based systems, particularly on the server side. The result? Far too many servers eating up way more energy than they need.
DON'T USE JAVA!!!! People who use Java are contributing to the downfall of the California economy.
I'm sure there is a reason, but why can't they just raise their prices so high that people, especially companies, get the bill say, "Goddamn! Turn that light off!" That way people will be highly encouraged to do their own "blackout" to reduce their bills. Like, I said, I'm sure there's a reason, but our wonderfull news never seems to explain what the reason is, they just say there is an energy crisis.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Wouldn't most internet companies/backbone sites/universities have uninterruptable power anyway? If the net shut down everytime the power in CA did, we'd be in bad shape.
Communications equipment usually runs off of 48 volts DC. The fiber terminators and other telco equipment (LIUs, concentrators, etc.) usually run off of a few lead-acid batteries which are continuously float-charged. Interruptions in the grid don't even phase them.
As for generators: many facilities have them as well to cover critical equipment. Every hospital with an OR has one. Hell even we have one, but it's for testing our starters with transfer switches and the like. :-)
Auckland - New Zealand is known as the "Dark-City" since the infamous power outages during the summer of 1997/1998. Why would any city willingly try to usurp Aucklands crown? :- illegal Password / please re-enter
I picked up a surplus honker of UPS. It cost me $600 to replace the crapped out batteries. Now I can stay up for three days with all my gear running! Woo Hoo!
satire, n: 1) witty language used to convey insults or scorn; 2) a form of humor lost on most slashdot moderators.
That was insightful?
That was moronic.
If conservatives hadn't scrapped funding for alternative fuels, OR hadn't scrapped conservation measures, OR hadn't deregulated, we wouldn't be in this mess. But since they've had their collective heads 10 miles up their asses for the last two decades on all things related to energy and environment, well... Here we are, in a completely predictable energy crunch that could have been avoided at any time by simply voting for people who have a clue about energy, and who don't have a vested interest in fossil fuels.
I live just south of South San Francisco and we're getting quick brown outs every night. I just invested in a nice UPS system to stop my computer barfing all the time - very handy. At work in Palo Alto (where the stage 3 was) we had to turn off all our lights and anything else we could to conserve power - one of the Hospitals put out a notice saying it was being affected!
I tried calling SCE but got a fast busy signal, so I gave up. Then about 20 minutes later, power blew out completely,
Once I thought to turn on my radio, I heard word that power was out all over the west coast.
My understanding is that a major power line coming from Washington got damaged. Because we in California don't have nearly enough local power capacity, scattered areas all over CA were blacked out to not overload what we do have.
Power was out about 2 hours for us in Orange. It was back before night, so I didn't even get to do any good astronomy. I heard power was out well into night elsewhere.
The *WHOLE* reason for all of this crap is the deregulation of the power industry. Come *on*, who owns the copper that comes into your house? That's a "natural monopoly" if there ever was one.
And we've been hearding stories on the news for *weeks* about how the deregulated, MBA-run power companies have *not* been putting money into capital plant investment, but playing games on the market.
If anything, it's a *MAJOR* reason to reregulate. Doesn't *ANYONE* have any idea that the *reason* there was "so much" government regulation in the first place, was because the robber barons, a century ago, abused their power so much that the public screamed, and voted in people who *would* regulate and control 'em?
Ignorant, uneducated kids.
Oh, and the one glance I took at the 7 zillion followups..."obligitory anti-environmental liberal-bashing on slashdot"? Huh?
And if there is...then they are not merely ignorant, but *stupid*.
mark "has attention span of more than 15 min."
If they wanna argue, they can email *me*...and I'll tell 'em about the days *before* the environmental laws, back in the sixties and seventies, when the rivers by cities smelled of human waste, literally, and areas near petrochemical refineries had air so bad, you couldn't understand how people could *live* there.
I find the de-reg experiment to be an utter failure because it proves the need for a nation-wide cap on prices--which really means charging more in the off-season. That's federal regulation. It can't be done with just one state. The legislation of California, if it doesn't act decisively, will be 100% to blame for the lack of energy. A rolling blackout, barring a true shortage of fuel, is always caused by negligence.
If there are blackouts, I strongly urge the residents of California to commence class actions against the state. Blackouts endanger lives, and it could be solved if California would borrow money from the Feds or other states to lend, in turn to the power companies.
The bottom line is: you have to do some things regardless of whether you can afford to, because of responsibility and duty.
----------------------
Yes, you read that right. California did *not* deregulate, at least not in any sense that I recognize as an economist or lawyer.
California no more deregulated than NAFTA introduced free trade: it doesn't take 400 words, let alone 400 pages, to describe free trade, and it California's electrical marget is still bizarrely regulated.
Commodities are generall purchased under a wide varieties of contract types--including the ability to produce for oneself. In particular, there are contracts of varying length, the shortest of which is the "spot market" for immediate purchase. NOt surprisingly, the prices tend to be highest in the spot maret. Particularly, the wildest price swings happen in that market.
What California did was to mandate that the utilities sell their own power plants--the ones with the most predictable costs. They then further required that all the electricity be purchased on the spot market.
I'm sure that they *could* have come up with a more idiotic system, but it would take some serious work. This one is spectacular, even by California standards . . .
The obvious solution: deregulation. Let the utilities or middlemen enter long-term contracts for power when they make sense. It will take time to adjust (noone wants to sell power they can sell on the spot market at a lower rate), but it will.
Also note that some parts of california, particularly san diego, were paying heavily subsidized electrical rates in teh past. SDG&E had unusually low production costs, which under they old system, led to unusually low rates.
hawk, economics professor and lawyer
ok, I also fled california when Wilson and Feinstein were the choices for governor . . .
1. System Conditions: Current System Load, Today's Peak Demand, Today's Forecast Peak, and Tomorrow's Forecast Peak.
:)
2. Current Active Notice(s): Will tell you any stage emergencies (it went to stage alert 3 today!) and other technical information.
Have fun!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
the pge and sce (http://www.pge.com http://www.sce.com) both have tips and pamphlets on how you can save engery in your home, as well as rebate programs for energy efficient appliances.
It's the geeky thing to do -- follow the tips and lower california's energy needs.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Let's see...Oregon, Washington, Canada, much of Europe have all the power they need AND cleaner air. So I guess it isn't the enironmental laws after all, my myopic rage-blinded friend. Maybe it was the power companies greed at selling off their generating assets under de-reg that got the consumer into this mess then huh? The only solvent utilities in California right now as the public ones! And they are comtemplating RATE CUTS! Geez, maybe your analysis and conclusion that the private sector can solve everything is a little flawed, ya think? Your Republican friends "feeding at the trough" (as David Stockman once put it so well) have once again screwed the working people.
I was working from home that day and discovered that my ISDN line didn't work (used that at the time for telecommuting); but this happened frequently on my block (unreliable power) so I figured I'd just go to the office. I went out to the car, and when I discovered that the electric buses didn't work, and the streetlights were out, it became obvious that nobody was going anywhere. My neighborhood coffee shop ran out of hot coffee very quickly, as EVERYONE needed some, and so I distinctly remember carrying home pre-ground french roast to make with my stovetop espresso maker.
It turned out that PG&E (that poor, suffering company in the news these days) had massively fucked up a maintenance job:
The problem, utility officials said, originated with a PG&E construction crew error during the installation of a new transformer at the San Mateo substation. The crew violated procedures and neglected to remove a safety ground wire before re-energizing that portion of the substation.
When the switch was thrown, electricity bypassed four 115,000-volt lines that supply power to the Peninsula and San Francisco and instead plowed into the ground.
Fortunately the circuit breakers did their thing and prevented all sorts of chaos (other than power loss) on the power grid. But PG&E certainly did not make a good impression that day!
sulli
RTFJ.
There are many who believe this is just a symptom of a much greater problem due to deregulation of the power industry. Its been said that our power grid is inherently unstable today as it was before the US began to regulate it in the late 40's. I would like to know from the people in the power industry if they believe this.
The Republican-controlled state legislature AND governor's mansion have since been replaced with Democrat-controlled legislature and governor. When the legislation to deregulate passed, the GOP knew the writing was on the wall.
I hate to tell you this, but we knew not to trust the bastards, and they got us in the end. Blame that CA state GOP, not the voters.
it's been about a month now these power emergencies have been striking california. there were a few stage 2 emergencies in which they declared those who had elected to have their power turned off in exchange for lower rates would then have their power cut. no one has lost power. we then had a stage 3 in which there would be rolling black outs. no one has since lost power.
"coincendentally", shortly after that, california's leaders and politicians announced that they were in meetings to think about re-regulating the power supply, giving pg&e back their monopoly over the power market.
after that, i didn't hear anything else about power emergencies until just recently. maybe the politicans elected not to re-regulate so far, so pg&e managed another emergency.
i don't think it was any coincedence that we're having these problems one or two years into a deregulated open market.
http://www.nakedandfree.com
I am a grad student and systems admin for the University of California, Santa Cruz. I feel like I live in a third world country. Power goes out here about twice a week. It is flickering as I type this. It is incredibly difficult to do research when you are not even guaranteed that your computational cluster will even stay up for a weeks time.
Censorship rests on the child's delusion that "If I shut my eyes so I can't see it, it isn't there".
Is there anyone out there in the /. community who has real knowledge about the measures that big tech companies with mission-critical operations take to mitigate against grid outages?
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
Actually, 4 servers, 2 personal boxes plus assorted sundry equipment to tie it all together.
I'd agree, though, that if the 'net connection goes with the power that I wouldn't be able to do much but invite the neighbors for a lan party.
satire, n: 1) witty language used to convey insults or scorn; 2) a form of humor lost on most slashdot moderators.
So far the media continues to scare us with there might be rolling blackouts. But when it comes time to the actual report there is still no word if that will happen or not.
The problem isn't with engery consumption nor a lack thereof, the problem is with the system. The state controls the power exchange (which is the company that resells the engery) and the state mandates that SDG&E/PG&E/SoCal Edision buy from the HIGHEST BIDDER. The power companies have kept their end of the bargain by not passing the buck to the consumers which is about to bankrupt the power companies and why they've requested to increase rates.
Also, for all those out-of-state companies out there selling the engery the reality is the power exchange can only buy from 1 source (still have no idea why the state does that).
For a deregulated system the state controls most of the process. I'm still wondering if this is deregulation. If you think about it the power exchange is supposedly modeled after Wall Street but does the goverment set the cost of the shares. And does the goverment mandate that only 1 company in Wall Street is the only company you can buy shares from because the cost per share is the highest?!?
If there are rolling blackouts you might start hearing about how Gray Davis should be kicked out of office (with probably everyone in the state congress).
If the power exchange was not controlled by the state I can see how it would work. Since you would have all these potential sellers competing with each other. But since the power exchange only ends up buying from one source where is the competition in that?
For the only source of media that seems to explain better than I can how deregulation was set up read this: http://reason.com/sullum/010901.html and this http://reason.com/ml/ml010401.html.
Most consumers watching the local news down here have yet to be told how deregulation was setup.
Jakee
Save Pangaea!! Stop Continental Drift!!
The power companies of south Louisiana don't have to bother scheduling for rolling blackouts, that job belongs to racoons and squirrels. They get inside the substations, and BZZZZT-KABOOM! Short circuit + exploding transformer = sweating your ass off in the stifling afternoon heat for 4 hours.
Actually it was Governer Davis who pushed the deregulation. I wouldn't call him a "liberal". But then labels are nearly always wrong.
What?
I hate the fact that the local, state, and federal government are all corporate sucking people f@ckers. Yes this is a giant conspiracy to defraud us and yes the morally correct thing to do is to round up the responsible parties and electrocute them! But, in spite of the fact that the government is nothing more than an enabling technology for corporate extortion I still say:
I moved to San Diego 2 years ago from New Jersey. And frankly, living in pseudo 3rd world conditions out here is FAR better than living back east with a bunch of abnoxious Seinfeld and Basketball obsessed type-A workaholics!
When my Quake server blacks out I'm going surfing --> so put that in your snow blowers and press start!
--Richard
Years ago the City Fathers in LA were screaming that LA needed more water or else its growth would be curtailed. Some perceptive columnist suggested that the solution was really simple... don't giver LA any more water and it wouldn't grow. That it had reached its limit. That growth limits apply to cities as well as everything else. Looks like the same yardstick should be applied to California now. Time for industry to look at other places to locate. Time for people to consider other olaces to live. Time for California to stop acting like cancer. Time to start planning growth rather than encouraging it willy-nilly. Time to stop thinking that the rest of us have an obligation to feed the uncontrolled growth of California.
In the chicago area Commenwealth Eddison has been rolling blackouts, especially in summer for a long time. You can even opt to pay more for "uninterruptable power". The company I work for has a huge generator so we can run our business during blackouts. We used to be on the unteruptable plan, but CE cut our power one day anyway, so being the multi-billion-per-yer computer reseller that we are (CDW) we couldn't take even a few hours of down time so we stoped paying for the uninteruptable power and put in a huge generator for downtime power.
LA decreased their pollution (but apparently back on the rise). Houston stayed the same. Considering the increased truck traffic due to NAFTA, that's ok. Just imagine what it will be like in a couple of years when Mexican trucks will be able to drive all across the US & Canada instead of only within a few miles of the border. And they don't have to follow our safety or pollution standards at all. fun, fun, fun.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
The funny thing is, I've thought about doing something like this to run my monitor... :-)
Temkin
2 space heaters, a coffee pot, 3 computers, cable conveter and 3 lamps... and that's just in my home office not the rest of my house. Not a hiccup all day long. Freaking utility bill is over 250$ a month here now, it'd better not be dropping out at that rate!!!
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
OK, so it's ever so slightly off-topic...
Today in Washington state they anounced the funding of a wind farm in the Columbia Gorge that will provide electricity to 70,000 homes in 11 Western states. (see www.seattletimes.com for details; it's on the front page today) This will be the world's largest wind farm and hopefully the start of a trend toward the usage of more more renewable resources.
Wow, I'm continually amazed at the benefits America has reaped from NAFTA, GATT, WTO, etc. Thanks for pointing out yet another.
While we haven't had blackouts yet, my electric bill is up about 300% since start of deregulation
To compare the cost of a solar power system (or wind or water power) to grid power:
- Design a system adequate for your needs.
- Compute its lifetime.
- Compute its cost, including purchase price, consumables, and maintainence costs over its lifetime.
- Compute the monthly payment if you took out a loan for that amount, running the lifetime of the system. (Don't forget tax credits and mortgage tax breaks if you finance it as part of your house.)
- Compute your average monthly number of kilowatt-hours generated.
- Divide the monthly payment by the monthly kilowatt-hours. This is your cost per kilowatt-hour.
The cost per kilowatt-hour of solar photovoltaic systems has been getting close to the crossover with respect to grid power. For some applications (like country houses or small-loads like illuminated billboards and traffic signs) where the instalation and fixed-costs of grid power are high it's already crossed over - which is why you see so many panels these days. It also beats diesel generators for portable power now.
A big enough jump in the grid's generation cost (such as the one in California, thanks to their shiny new centrally-planned socialized electric system) might push it over even for urban residences.
And California is a good spot for solar. At the latitude of the SF Bay area, for instance, insolation is about 5 solar hours per day. Once you're east of the coastal range (unless you're just downwind of a gap in it or on the west side of a still higher mountain) there's little daytime fog or cloud cover.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Deregulation will take the blame for instead of the environmental nutballs who didn't want to build generation. Democrat legislators always try to punish the citizens so that they will change their ways.
1. Use space heater or electric blanket instead of central heating;
2. go see a night movie, visit bars.
3. candle light dinner
4. turn off your frig and order pizza.
5. candle light wild wild sex.
6. use computer monitor as main light source.
7. use laptop instead of desktop.
8. take one shower a day instead of two.
--- You make things foolproof, and they'll find you a damn fool.
Yeah, but the byproduct you are talking about is Plutonium. Plutonium is dangerous in that it can make nuclear weapons and it is incredibly toxic. In fact in wartime it might be more deadly to distribute it in a conventional bomb scattering it rather than as a nuclear weapon. There are good reasons for limiting the production of Plutonium. But alas, because of these breeder reactors there is enough plutonium in the world for any terrorist's plans. There really is no reason for such opposition to them anymore in the US and they should be employed.
Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
Cisco's got it's own substation on Tasman in San Jose, just past Zanker Rd.
But then, Cisco pretty much singlehandedly funded the SJ/Santa Clara/Mt. View lightrail, too.
.@.
Jon Katz moves to Silicon Valley, where he writes articles for Slashdot every day. The flames generated by the replies to his posts will heat the vapourware of the dot-coms and turn it into steam, which will be forcibly injected into the Californian politicians, causing them to expel hot air, which will spin the environmentalists around, and will cause them to generate yet more hot air, which heats up all political debates leading to more ballot initiatives and of course more manual recounts. Soon the public will become so tired of the constant news coverage of the manual recounts that they will all turn off their TV, computer, and stereo and go outside (some programmers will finally realize what binary trees are named after). This will greatly reduce the load on the power grid, making everyone happy. And if people ever go back into their homes and turning on their TV, computer, and stereo, then the Jon Katz machine will operate again and the whole process begins anew.
Those who do not know the past are doomed to reimplement it, poorly.
First you should read up on the situation before you speak, or in your case should I say speck. This was not a Deregulation any moron who believes that, ohhh I am sorry, any ill-informed individual who believes that should read the parent post, which partly explains what really happened, or do some more research, DEREGULATION NEVER HAPPENED. Second what kind of fool believes that Liberals are for any increase in generation of power. I would refrain from using the term "get your head out of your ass." Only cause you really need to get hit by a clue stick. The legislation which passed the current power fiasco was Liberal, trying to blame this on Conservatives is just an attempt not to take responsibility for Liberal actions. On top of all this is the fact, which has been pointed out, that for the last ten years nothing has been built to generate more power, yet the popluation in California has doubled. Again as stated this is because of many reasons, one of which I must mention is the very strict Enviromental laws but I am sure you knew that as well. By the way look at the people who "we" voted for did I mention California is about 60% democrats, isn't that intresting.
"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance" -Confucius
Sometimes I think the tree-huggers out there think everyone would be so much better off without all of our technology. But that didn't save the millions of people who died from polio, the Plague, cancer, and all the other treatable diseases that science and the use of energy have made possible. Technology and energy use, and cutting down forests to make houses to live in makes life better, not worse. Sure there are abuses of technology all the time, but the benefits far outweigh the disadvantages.