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After Recent US Storms, Why Are Millions Still Without Power?
Hugh Pickens points out a report from Jamie Smith Hopkins that "The unusual nature of the 'derecho' is complicating efforts to get everyone's much-needed air conditioning up and running again as more than 1.4 million people from Illinois to Virginia still remain without power and power companies warn some customers could be without power for the rest of the week in the worst hit areas. Utilities don't have enough staff to handle severe-storm outages – the expense would send rates soaring – so they rely on out-of-state utilities to send help, says Stephen Woerner, Baltimore Gas and Electric's (BGE) chief operating officer. Hurricane forecasts offer enough advanced warning for utilities to 'pre-mobilize' and get the out-of-state assistance in place but the forecast for Friday's walloping wind was merely scattered thunderstorms. 'No utility was prepared for what we saw in terms of having staff available that first day,' says Woerner. But is it a given that a strong storm would cause this magnitude of damage to the electricity grid? 'Even without pursuing the extremely expensive option of burying all of the region's electrical lines, the utilities can and do take steps between bouts of severe weather to prevent outages,' writes the Baltimore Sun, adding that consumer advocates are concerned that utilities invest sufficiently in preventive maintenance. 'Tree trimming and replacement of old infrastructure — particularly in areas that have been shown to be vulnerable to previous storms — helps prevent outages.'"
Goddamn, napping on a man lift next to a downed livewire?!?! Who DOES that?!?!?
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
It's because we never bother to maintain our infrastructure. We build bridges and let 'em fall down. We hang power lines off wooden poles, and never bother burying them. We sort of fix it when it breaks, but then it breaks again, but we don't really learn from it.
--Udo.
Utility rate regulation is a system of assuring the investors of their return in return for doing something the public wants done. US Utility Rate Regulation used to be aimed at making sure that the maximum generation capacity was present with adequate return for lines and repairs etc. Under the George W Bush administration this regulation shifted towards "Pipeline" design for power sales. This stripped the local Coop or supply company of its revenue for service and maintainence. Further changes in regulation changed the position of the large generators so that they have little or no incentive to build new facilities. As such the USA is losing its grid to a very finely tuned profit machine that has no instinct for self preservation. Everything is now and nothing is tomorrow. The result is that the USA is fast sinking into a 3rd world power grid with massive failures and stunningly stupid management. The power rating system optimizes the push towards insufficient demand and planned brownouts. The 1930's regulation design caused the largest expansion and most robust utility system in the world. The 2000's are seeing this systematically dismantled in favor of "deregulation" which in this case is a farce because the regulation exists this is only a matter of how it is designed.
Here in Europe, the news reports a very simple reason: a totally dilapidated infrastructure. Most power wires still hanging off of poles, subject to lightning, wind and falling trees. Decades-old transformers and switching stations that fail catastrophically, and sometimes cause cascading failures.
I haven't lived on the East Coast for decades - any power engineers want to comment on the truth or falsity of these reports?
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
In Florida since we get nasty storms all of the time the power companies have full time crews that trim trees near power lines. They are going to have to do it anyway when a storm comes and it's easier to do it when the weather is nice for 3/4 of the year than when the storms come in the heat and humidity of the summer. All you have to do is call them up to take a look at a tree near their lines and they will take a look and trim it if needed.
The rest of the country might not get this weather often enough to spend the time to maintain the trees so when a freak storm comes by you not only have had lots of tree growth but it's growth that hasn't been subjected to high winds.
http://www.fpl.com/residential/trees/index.shtml
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
As someone who was without power from Friday night to yesterday afternoon in Maryland (served by BG&E), I get that this was bad storm and outages are probably inevitable. My problem is: Why are there so many of these outages?
I moved to my current residence in 2006 and there have been at least 4 outages lasting longer than 24 hours. I think I'm missing one in that count, but I didn't want to put it down without remembering it better. But we've had one of these 24+ hour outages each of the last three years.
When I step outside during an outage, I'm greeted with the sound of generators all around me (including my own, but it's quiet enough that I hear several others over it). Why do we all have generators? Because we need them so frequently! I bet if I did a poll, half the neighbors would either have a generator or have power from someone that does. And a good portion of the rest probably have friends or family far enough that they might have power, but near enough to make staying at their place feasible.
Meanwhile...my water works fine. My natural gas service works fine - we were able to take hot showers throughout the outage. My FiOS worked fine after I hooked it to the generator. All of those things have one thing in common: the lines are buried. It's sad that my internet service is more reliable than my electricity. If it's so expensive to bury wires, how come Verizon just did it a couple years ago when they installed FiOS?
BG&E did a "reliability improvement plan" in our city a year or two ago, moving some main wires underground. It seems to have cut down on the shorter power outages, but no such luck for the longer outages. We're tired of it. My wife and I are going to write BG&E a nice letter that basically asks "WTF?" I plan to CC the city council and local papers as well.
When I first came to US, I was shocked to see those wood utility poles. It is so ancient. There are many excuses for keeping those. People need to go to some developing countries, particularly BRIC, to take a look at their infrastructures. Where is the $$ for change?
^(oo)^pig~
I sat in on a town hall meeting where JCP&L fumbled majorly in explaining themselves after taking a week or more to restore power in northern NJ. They gave all manner of excuses, and the meeting attendees pointed out endless examples of dead branches hanging over wires. Their policy? Then don't touch the branch unless the branch is *hanging* on the wire. How's that for foresight? The moment a strong wind kicks up, they lose power. They're so fucking cheap that they fired all their linemen, and now out-of-state emergency support has become the ONLY support.
Shame on them.
I completely agree here... When I moved back to Europe in 94 they were in full swing moving power cables from above ground to below ground. Now in 2012 it is rare to see an above ground house to house power cable... With most of them, outside of the big distributor cables, underground it is also nicer looking as there are no more power lines.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Nature happens. You guys are knee'jerk reacting. Next story.
My home state of CT had two storms that took out power to most of the state for over a week just last year. Get on our level.
On a serious note, it's kind of sad to see that even after our horrendous storms and massive consumer backlash against CL&P's near-monopoly, there are still power companies out there acting like it could never happen to them, not having a contingency plan for the worst case scenario.
It's simply because Europeans are denser.
rewriting history since 2109
For comparison, our computers have reset unexpectedly twice (iirc) in the past 12 years. I assume that both times it was due to a short power-blip. No other outages that I recall. I think occasionally about buying a UPS, but I'm not sure the UPS wouldn't actually decrease the reliability.
The difference is exactly what you expect: all power wires here are buried. Heck, our house was built in 1934, and the wires were buried. Why does the US still string them up on poles, almost a century later? Weird...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Yes, let's spend trillions for that extra 1% uptime instead of just let the people who absolutely have to have emergency power buy an inexpensive generator.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Peophttp://news.slashdot.org/story/12/07/03/1330239/after-recent-us-storms-why-are-millions-still-without-power?utm_source=slashdot&utm_medium=facebook#le need to start becoming independent from utilities. Drilling wells Solar Powered roofs Wind power NEED I SAY MORE
While I agree, it would be nice to do most of this, it's also not the be-all, end-all solution. Particularly in the case of the recent derecho. Where I live, we had sustained winds of 70 mph and gusts over 90. There are trees with 3 foot diameters that the trunks were snapped off. There are utility poles that were blown over (no trees on the lines). Shingles were blown off of roofs. Solar panels would probably have made for nice sails in this storm. Or been smashed by flying debris. Residential wind turbines have dubious value at best. In this area, I doubt you could generate enough power from one to justify its cost. It most likely would have made a nice projectile in this storm. Wells are only useful (or legal) depending on where you live. My town has a population around 50K. We can't drill a well here. Not that the water table could support this if everyone did. I can just see someone in NYC deciding to drill a well. Not that anyone in their right mind would drink water from a well there.
I lose electrical power at least once a year. Sometimes it's just a few blocks, sometimes it's a quarter of the city. It usually happens during thunder storms, but once in a while it happens for no apparent reason. It usually takes several hours for it to be restored. This is in a city of 200,000 in the Midwest. Several decades ago, this was acceptable; electricity was a convenience that gave us light and maybe ran some of our home appliances. But today it is essential to our daily lives; too many things now require electricity to work. And yet... we're still using the same basic infrastructure that my grandparents got their electricity from during the Great Depression.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
it's like the wal mart attitude of just buy the cheapest no matter what the hidden costs are of buying more products to make up for the crappy cheapest product in the first place
same here. dollar wise for the initial costs its cheaper to put up overhead wires. and the repair costs are probably low enough that digging holes is always too expensive.
and the fact that when you get to the republican areas everyone is always against higher taxes so they make due with crappy infrastructure
Remove regulatory barriers to small private, personal and community power generation systems and solve this problem!
It all starts at 0
Which would require multiple utility corridors all of which would need to be maintained, twice as many "unsightly" poles and twice the cost of running the service in the first place - read higher lot prices, twice the maintenance work to keep the trees cut back, twice as many unhappy homeowners as their trees that they planted to close to the right of way are cut back - "I didn't know it would grow that high!", lots of isolation and distribution stations where even more things could go wrong, and you'd still be at the same risk when a big storm hit.
If you don't like the situation, buy a big diesel generator and wire it in. Then have a big storage tank of diesel close by.
The US electric grid is a product of history much more than planning with bits tacked on or merged as short-term goals dictated without much in the way of long-term planning. (There are actually three main US grids, one for the East, one for the West and one for Texas). Maggie Koerth-Baker wrote an excellent book, "Beforee the Lights Go Out," which is about the grid and related issues that discusses this and how it creates a lot of these problems and what we can do about it. I highly recommend it.
Seriously. Look at a map for any densely populated urban area, and consider the scale and complexity any utility provider must face. The problem is enormous and the adverse conditions affecting the utility are highly varied. Also consider that it makes no sense for these utility providers to retain standing armies of workers and equipment to react to rare events.
People need to grow up, and understand that sometimes they will be left without the conveniences of modern life. It is incumbent upon each of us to be prepared for these difficult times when we might have to go a full 48 hours without being able to watch The Bachelorette.
and if they were to put a new charge on your bill to pay for this improvement almost everyone would riot.
The NE neighborhoods are so old they predate power lines. Tearing up all the streets and sidewalks in the entire northeastern US would have cost ridiculous amounts of money.
Remember - government spending is bad. REGARDLESS of the outcome for us. Government spending = taxes, and as everyone knows, this country was founded on three principles:
1.God is in heaven, satan is in hell, and we are a Christian nation.
2. I have the right to own any firearm I wish, up to and including napalm.
3. TAXATION??? This country isn't designed to have taxes. Why should I have to pay for YOUR roads and YOUR power and YOUR schools? Socialist pig.
Seriously, though, it seems to me that infrastructure spending is one of those no-brainer things that shouldn't even be a question.
You can't say all that without specifying what part of the USA you had visited. The United States, when it comes to area, is almost as big as all of Europe and, thus, creating a reliable infrastructure is a harder job than it is in Europe. You have to think in terms of scale, cost, and time/manpower required. Kneejerk responses are not what's needed. You can't criticize without first figuring out exactly what is needed and how it can be reasonably ("reasonably" being the key word here) accomplished.
...and your entire continent is bankrupt.
I'd be more than happy to hear wooshing if it meant sustainable power with less interruptions. Honestly I don't see what the big deal is here. Where I'm at there are 3 sets of train tracks about 100yds from my building and I get along just fine. Can't imagine that a few wind turbines would be that much louder..
You can't take the sky from me.
> Seriously, though, it seems to me that infrastructure spending is one of those no-brainer things that shouldn't even be a question.
Of course it's a question; why should it be any different just because it's "infrastructure?" If there is demand for it, let the free-market provide it... nothing dictates that "infrastructure" be provided by some entity that maintains a monopoly on the use of force. Note too that "free market" includes voluntarily assembled co-operatives and communes. Communal activity for common good is one thing... forced participation in some initiative, at the point of a gun barrel, is something quite different.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
Because quick profits and millisecond gains are the king in US. The utilities are trying to save both on infrastructure and maintenance. Having the power lines been buried, like in pretty much every first world country, they would have had a lot less problems from a little wind. I am pretty sure that the next post would be how this is too expensive because of the 'low' population density and the 'rural' populations and I call this complete bollocks. The utility poles are as prevalent in urban areas as they are out in the country. So, you saved on infrastructure and this is probably OK, but then you need to maintain it. And this means keeping the trees away from the poles, not overloading the wooden poles to the point where a little wind will snap them and replacing them before they rot completely away. Now this makes the cheap infrastructure a lot more expensive, unless you skip on the maintenance, which is what most utilities cheerfully do. This is by no means the only utilities fault. Any investment cost will need to be passed to the consumers and they will have none of it.
Right because they're not paying health dividends instead of paying for regular maintenance....
"...recent Public Service Commission investigation of Pepco found a years-long pattern of shirking such maintenance (curiously, at the same time that the company was paying its stockholders healthy dividends). The commission handed down a $1 million fine, its largest ever, for what it called a pattern of neglect. "
Moron...
First, these utilities are heavily regulated as public monopoly.
Second, dilapidated infrastructure implies that it has existed for many, many years...before the privatization.
Third, Power lines and other various utilities have been hung on poles since day one. Burying all these existing lines takes tons of time and tons of money.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Quite true. While power lines are mostly above ground, public transit varies greatly. Consider the differences between Chicago, New York, San Francisco and DC when it comes to the subway (operating times, cleanliness, safety, speed, reach). Of course, things are different in smaller towns, but I was under the impression that is the case in other places as well? I'd be interested in more specifics (including an example "modern country") to compare to. The original AC's comment seems to mostly hit on above ground power lines.
Why are Americans so obsessed with air conditioning?
Because their summer climate is crap. When you've got temperatures around 100F and humidity over 90%, you become very keen on air conditioning.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
> Seriously, though, it seems to me that infrastructure spending is one of those no-brainer things that shouldn't even be a question.
Of course it's a question; why should it be any different just because it's "infrastructure?" If there is demand for it, let the free-market provide it... nothing dictates that "infrastructure" be provided by some entity that maintains a monopoly on the use of force. Note too that "free market" includes voluntarily assembled co-operatives and communes. Communal activity for common good is one thing... forced participation in some initiative, at the point of a gun barrel, is something quite different.
Except that utilities are a regulated industry so free market doesn't apply.
I think you're right, except for the spin. The idea of throwing warm bodies at repairing high power lines is not a good one. The reason the liability would be high is because it would be carnage. The job is already dangerous - it's the 8th most dangerous job in the US. Work that is a safe distance from power lines won't be done by the specialized workers you're talking about anyways. As for those greedy unions, right now they're working 16 hour days in 100+ degree heat. I think they deserve every penny. Electricity is cheap.
So is ours.
Not if they were properly installed. In addition to being quite heavy (being made out of sand and metal), most installations have panels bolted to metal brackets which are permanently fixed to the roof. The panels aren't going anywhere without the roof.
They can get smashed, but there are some types of panels that are resistant to such damage, and can even be repaired (a little solder to fix any broken connections and a new glass sheet over the top should be more than enough).
And individual merely needs to weigh the costs of having occasional/extraordinarily rare outages like this against the costs of the system.
Except this is the responsibility of the utility. They decided to pay out healthy dividends instead of regular maintenance. When the utilities were regulated back in '92 they were suppose to invest money back into the infrastructure. After deregulation, they don't bother.
Have you actually been to any third world countries? I have, and I can tell you that the US is nothing at all like a third world country. In the slightest.
Case in point, I walk into my hotel for business in a third world country *at night*, it's a fairly nice hotel even. The power flicks out. No one is fazed because the computers and some lighting are still on, but most of the lighting is off and I am standing in the dark in a hotel lobby, without a cloud in the sky. Yes, this is due to scheduled blackouts. The blackouts continue for the rest of my two week stay, with perfect weather. That is what a third world country is like.
In the US, an unexpectedly strong storm with hurricane force winds come through. Some portion of people are without power for a few days because it was basically a hurricane without the days long weather track. That is annoying, but not a big deal.
As for the rest of it, the US has a shitty public transit system, but 95% of Americans own cars with relatively cheap gas. We don't *need* a public transit system like you might in other countries. The internet may well be slower than what you have into your house, maybe, but I can still do pretty much anything that anyone needs to do, short of running a popular website from my home computer.
The problems you are talking about are what we call "first world problems", not third world ones.
We spent 4 trillion on a tax break and two wars and got NOTHING for it. Why not spend trillions on building a huge industry that would make us energy independent? Money spent on building shit benefits us all. The fifties were full of crazy ideas and huge projects and what did we get, the most awesome country in the world.
Also "inexpensive generator" do you mean one that can run AC? So in my house that is 4x40 amp circuits, plus a 15 amp for the fridge, two more 15's for the lights so a ~20K watt generator? So $5k plus installation, that's a two day job for an electrician so lets say $10k installed. Even if that is one in ten house houlds in America that is a fuck load of money. Why not spend it on something that will generate electricity for many many years and give us a hard currency export.
Print it. It is called stimulus. We need to bury all of our lines AND run fiber that is owned by the public. If we do not engage in physical infrastructure (data and roads/energy) soon it doesn't matter if you fix education, the job market or international trade. If we do not have the medium with which to facilitate economic activity it will be like taking the wheels off of a bus.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
If anyone really gave a shit they would just let the other political party take full credit for the idea and legislative implementation. Get it done. The greatest infrastructure planner/implementer ever used to say, "It is amazing what you can accomplish if you are willing to let someone else take the credit."
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Australia is as big as the US with less than a tenth of the population and our utilities/roads/sewers/etc are closer to Western European standards than US standards. The difference is regulatory frameworks, the US have gutted theirs in the last decade or so, kinda like they did with the financial industry. Australia and Europe have things like universal service obligations which make it illegal for utilities to discriminate against remote customers.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Have you ever actually encountered a failure in an underground line? The industrial park where my employer is located has mostly underground main feeds (13k volts overhead tends to make people nervous with all the large, easily snagged trucks moving through). We've lost power twice since I started here and finding the outage was trivial. Hook-up at the distribution box, take a reading off the line and it gives you the distance to the fault. Walk it down and dig. Both outages were fixed in a couple hours time each. No way you could sink a new pole that quickly.
cat
Natural monopolies should not be allowed to be private for profit corporations. Your arguments are weak at best.
1st they are NOT heavily regulated anymore. The mines are a heavily regulated industry and the coal companies are able to do what ever the fuck they want, the energy industry has more liquidity than you can shake a strike at and in the real world the have come to indirectly control their regulating bodies. Look at any after the fact analysis of any disaster and you will see that the regulators are the bitches of the industry. Enron, Deep Water Horizon, Halliburton, Exxon, or a coal disaster.
2nd is logical fallacy. Who fucking cares what it implies? The fact is that everything wears down. Some forward thinking people set aside money to fix the things they build. Excellent case in point the ceiling beams of a Cambridge building were huge old growth oak and the renovators thought it would be impossible to replace them, ahhh but wait the architect 300 years ago planted Oaks in Scotland for the express purpose of replacing the beams when they wore out. Just because most people are idiots doesn't mean that smarter people can plan for the future. It is in fact why we have representative democracy in the first place. We privatized it all just when we needed to make sure that profits weren't extracted before maintenance.
3rd things have always been done this way change is bad! Also do you mean waste or spend? Not all spending is waste. Waste in this case would be replacing blown down lines for the x number of time adding up to a greater cost than burying it. It is called math it has a magical ability to determine the actual value of possible courses of action over time.
In case you missed the subtext here I think you are a fucking idiot and a shill to boot.
When the economy hit the black water tank in 2008, China made a stimulus package. It didn't just go to replacing cars either.
They spent money adding airports, roads, rail, laying fiber, even adding chip factories so they can fab their own stuff if need be.
It has helped their economy immensely. Their factories are highly competitive because their government and business cooperate. They can get raw materials to where they need to go on a scale that couldn't be matched here in the states due to the government being told not to do it, and the private sector uninterested in funding it.
I would much rather hear the 'whoosh' of a windmill all day, than feel that skin crawling, bone tingling, feeling when I cross under the high tension power lines.
You're the first to mention tree trimming. That's a big debate in itself.
People complained about outages after Hurricane Whatever a few years ago so the utility came through and cut back everything. My neighborhood looked like a war zone when they were done. They even bush-hogged my flower garden. Then everybody complained about the trimming. Of course, we still lost power for 36 hours last weekend.
Every homeowner should have a generator, a water pump, and a gun. Waiting until you need one to get it is too late.
:wq
Because "free market" is a lousy way to provide essential services. If you do, then only high profit neighborhoods will have affordable power. Most rural communities are heavily subsidized by their denser neighbors.
If this was a free market, then utilities would pull out of poor and low profit neighborhoods.
I know; I work for a utility. We have neighborhoods where we will never, ever, "make a profit", because we had to sink so much into the infrastructure that at our normal rates we will never make our investment back.
On the whole we're "profitable" - as profitable as a public corporation can be. But we could be raking in the big bucks if we were private and allowed to abandon "poorly performing" or "unprofitable" neighborhoods.
So your "free market" would take us back to the days when the rich had power, clean water, sewer, and internet, and the poor lived in squalor and filth.
You can't say all that without specifying what part of the USA you had visited. The United States, when it comes to area, is almost as big as all of Europe and, thus, creating a reliable infrastructure is a harder job than it is in Europe. You have to think in terms of scale, cost, and time/manpower required. Kneejerk responses are not what's needed. You can't criticize without first figuring out exactly what is needed and how it can be reasonably ("reasonably" being the key word here) accomplished.
I had this impression in large parts of NYC. for example, driving into Manhattan from JFK in the early 1990ies felt somewhat like just having landed in Havana. It seemed not as extreme in the past few years, but still not what a European would expect. Then in wide area of, e.g., Greenwich Village the outer building walls from ground level up to the roof are haphazadly crisscrossed by wires for heaven knows what, which enter the apartments through drill holes that seem hastily plastered over. Obviously hyperbole, but it did remind me somewhat of India. I was there during the hurricane Irene scare, and was constantly amazed by the fear of wide-scale infrastructure failure, and looking at the state of the public infrastructure was thinking "well, no need to be surprised".
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
they would be difficult to find and extremely expensive to fix. I'm not sure that I see underground cabling to be that much of an advantage.
Look up Time Domain Reflectometry. With it, an engineer can find a line break or insulation leakage to within a few centimeters on a kilometers-long stretch of wire. Underground damage is just not all that hard to find anymore. As far as expense, maintenance of overhead wires is surprisingly high. They have to continually trim trees to keep them away, they have to continually fix broken wires due to storms or cars and trucks accidentally ramming poles, and the risks to passersby from downed wires is a huge liability, with millions of dollars of lawsuits per death on the line. Compare those to the costs of burying a cable that basically will just sit there for years on end, with generally no significant mechanical stresses on it to cause failures.
The only drawback is making the investment to bury the wires. The payback is measured in decades, not months like the Chief Financial Officers want to see. They'd rather spend money on investments with quick profits.
John
Well, as an european I would call it typical US that you conclude from one particular third world country, that you had visited, on all of them :D
Especially from one event alone.
We here in europe call the USA a third world country with a first world army. Thats why you are considered so dangerous.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
There are also geographic issues as well. East of Houston to Florida is swamp. Good luck burying anything there. There is a reason why Louisiana is known for its elaborate crypts and morgues. There is just no way to bury the dead, so they have to remain above ground.
The US is a very disparate country. Some places the cities are as safe as Europe (Seattle, Portland, and chunks of NYC.) Other places, not so much. One of the main reason why some cities are burying cables now is because overhead lines tend to be a target for metal thieves so they can get their next meth fix.
Australia's population density is somewhat misleading, like Canada, it's fairly densly populated where there are people and essentially empty elsewhere. The US is made up of a number of people on coasts, and a huge number of smaller, remote inland cities imagine Australia's infastructure requirements if 1/4 of the population (and half of Parliment) were made up of people who came from essentially cities like Alice Springs spread throughout the inland. We have universal service obligations as well.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
+1, unintentionally funny.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
The solution is obvious, move to smaller distributed power plants. The limit as x goes to infinity would of course be no power grid, everyone has their own power generating capacity.
And how many trillions do you lose due to power outtages?
How many trillions would come directly back as taxes?
How many trillions could you make by selling more power because your grid is better?
How cheap exactly is a generator and the switching/gearing to connect it to your house?
Your point is very short sighted, indeed.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Again, it's like saying that Europe has a pony, so I need a pony too or I'm somehow a third world country. It's nice that you all have public transit systems, but even if we had a nice public transit system, I'd still not want to use it. I *like* not having to share a train with hundreds of my closest friends when I go to work every morning. I get in my car, turn on my stereo and a half hour later, I'm at work. And this is in fairly heavy traffic.
As for better Internet, I'm not arguing against it, but everyone I know has the ability to stream just about everything they want or play any online game they want, with low latency, using just what bandwidth we have. I imagine that as available bandwidth goes up, we will find more uses for it, but I'm not seeing why we have to have it just to have it. I'm not even sure what you are doing with that bandwidth other than stating that you have a higher number. My car goes to 160mph, but I can't imagine anywhere I'd get even close to that, short of a very good run on a track. Bandwidth speeds will go up as they need to.
PLEASE PLEASE buy a real transfer switch. It will only add another couple of hundreds of dollars, but prevents the backfeed from killing the guy trying to fix your power.
Uhh, because the maintenance would have cost more than a million dollars, and they have a monopoly. If there were another energy company that had well maintained/buried lines, you can bet everyone would be switching to them right now, and Pepco would be out of business. But they aren't, because the government won't let anyone else into their space.
The government requires that corporations act in the best interest of their shareholders lest they be vulnerable to shareholder lawsuits. It forces corporate boards to do anything and everything, including violating the law, to get the benefit for their shareholders. It is institutionalized sociopathy. Fascism incarnate.
I live in central Maryland. There is more to this than just a Derecho. We get every two to three years. They're not unheard of.
We had a mild winter and a cool spring. The winter did not have any significant snow or ice. So weak tree limbs didn't come down. There weren't many significant thunderstorms in the spring either, so no significant dead wood fell because of that. Here we are in early summer, and we get the first major storm of the season and all that weak and dying wood that hasn't been cleared out of the trees comes down at once. In many cases it takes the whole damned tree down. This wouldn't have been a big deal if it had been spread over a few storms here and there, but instead it happened all at once.
In so many ways, this was a perfect storm...
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
It's not critical to normal, healthy adults in a resting state, but when the heat index hits 105 to 130 F (40-55C), the sick, elderly, and those performing physical labor start dying. I'd wager that over 50% of the deaths attributed to this storm are due to heat-related illness.
Don't forget that hose poor living in squalor and filth would be stealing from and infecting the rich, and periodically lining them up against walls and shooting them.
Subsidizing basics like power, clean water, sewer and education for the poor works out quite well for the rich overall.
Any underground system that has a problem with ground water and flooding isn't built correctly.
Any earth movement sufficient to disrupts electrical line will be local, and will be the same issue if they had been above ground.
When ever electricity is lot to wind people talk about the infrastructure; which needs to be modernized.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Gov't spending IS bad regardless of outcome. ALL gov't spending is bad under ALL situations.
Sending First generation and low-income students through college is bad? I always assumed that more education = less money spent in the long run . . . . But I guess that decades of research (just google that) can be wrong. . . .
The productive USA was built without income taxes, without corporate taxes, without payroll taxes, without FDIC, Fed, IRS, FDA, FHA, EPA, CIA, FBI, SS, Medicare, EI, Medicaid, welfare, without dep't of energy, education, agriculture, small business, commerce, interior, HUD, etc.
Do you know why those things exist? To protect citizens. You can say what you want about the Gub'ment being out to get you, but it's true. Private enterprise in the 19th and early 20th century proved one thing, over-and-over, it will cut costs to the point of being dangerous to its workers, just to increase short-term profits. What choice do we have? Are you telling me that we can trust corporations to do what's in our best interests? If you say yes, please google anything with large businesses and the start of the labor movement.
But how does a country become a productive exporter, creditor without gov't building infrastructure? Because it's not true that gov't is needed to build any of it, what IS true is that WEALTH is needed to build infrastructure.There has to be a REASON to build infrastructure, there has to be wealth first, there has to be a promise of making a return - the profit motive is the driver, nothing else.
Okay, what about us who live where it wouldn't be profitable to run power, water or any other essential service? I guess we're just screwed. And Profit as the driver is an incredibly fine line. Today's attitude of bar-the-door short-term profits at the expense of all else doesn't exactly lend itself to developing long-term strategy. You know what does? Slow-moving government.
Infrastructure? How about the Keystone pipeline - the actual PRODUCTIVE infrastructure that private companies want to build, because they believe it's going to be profitable, it's going to make money. Is that the wrong thing today somehow - making money? USA was built by business, not by any government. USA was built by ABSENCE of gov't, people came to USA for freedoms from their totalitarian governments.
Keystone pipeline = 250,000 jobs is what we're told. NO, Keystone pipeline = 250,000 MOSTLY TEMPORARY man-year jobs. So, if it creates 20,000 jobs that last for 6 months, that's 10,000 jobs, correct? Nope. A job is a stable, long-term position. A temporary employment opportunity is what they're counting. It has nothing to do with long-term solutions. Granted, it's better than nothing, but change the discussion from how many jobs it will create by hyperbole, and actually give us a realistic number. I haven't been able to find one. And I'm not willing to trust someone who is driven by PROFIT to do what is in my best interest. No thank you.
The countries today that do the best are those that removed the most government controls from their economy over time, and USA is moving in a completely wrong direction.
Citation please? Are you talking about third world hell-holes? Or the pseudo-socialist Europeans?
You want infrastructure? You can't have infrastructure, there is nothing to build it for, and if there is something to build it for (like an oil pipeline) you are arguing against it, and it's not even a government project. You are not going to have infrastructure, because you don't have production. You are not going to have education and science, because you don't have manufacturing and engineering.
Wat? Are you saying that infrastructure necessarily equals profits and oil? Infrastructure means fixi
PLEASE PLEASE buy a real transfer switch. It will only add another couple of hundreds of dollars, but prevents the backfeed from killing the guy trying to fix your power.
More like $300-$400 US for the switch, an additional $300-$400 US to get a qualified electrician to install it properly, and $50-$100 for the proper permits. YMMV of course based on location.
Having said that, it is something you really should do if you are going to connect a generator to your house wiring in any way, shape, or form. To expand a bit, a transfer switch connects your house wiring to your generator's power while at the same time disconnecting your house wiring from your power company's feed. If you don't disconnect from the power company, power from your generator can back feed onto the pole and ultimately down the line to where a lineman might be working. At best the lineman will detect that the line is still live and it will take time to track down your feed. At worst he could be electrocuted. No matter what, switching your house systems to generator power should automatically disconnect those systems from the public utility. If it takes two separate actions then one of them can be forgotten and someone can get hurt or killed.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
Low skilled workers and 7200 volt power lines, what could go wrong?
If anyone really gave a shit they would just let the other political party take full credit for the idea and legislative implementation. Get it done. The greatest infrastructure planner/implementer ever used to say, "It is amazing what you can accomplish if you are willing to let someone else take the credit."
I wish. The modern day paradigm is more like "Death to the Infidels!" Nothing less than total destruction of the other sides. "Polar opposites". One side wants to steal your money, the other wants to give your money away. One side eats their babies, the other side wants to eat YOUR babies. But they're polar opposites.
We promote schemes of government and economic plans that - for whatever merits they may or may not possess - aren't going to work because their one fatal flaw is that they only work at all if everyone signs on. And then go to great lengths to ensure that only the True Believers are likely to sign on at all. And complain that we just need a little more time and a little more control.
Ideology is for idiots.
So why are we letting the idiots run everything?
But the person that digs would have to pay the damages, not the end-user. And that problem exists with fiber too and although a frequent occurrence, it doesn't necessarily take the whole US Internet out or even the Internet for a city.
The problem is multi-fold
- The government put the cables in a long time ago, sometimes during periods where certain products were scarce (usually because of war) and thus sub-par elements were used (aluminum or steel)
- Privatized utilities got the wiring for free on the promise that they would expand and renew and have been collecting money but not investing it
- No government oversight for the privatized utilities to keep on their promise so things have not been inspected for years
- Patchwork as-needed repairs causing unnecessary losses and dependencies
- Increases in demand, decreases in classic resistive demands
- Most of the heaviest things (motors, airco) in homes still run on 110V even though 220V has been available in most homes but most homes haven't been wired correctly for 220V
- Now that the system is on the brink of collapse, the utilities go with outstretched hand back to the government in order to have the taxpayer pay for it regardless
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
imminent domain
LOOK OUT!
It's about to happen.
What's about to happen you ask?
Domain. It's imminent.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
Ah. Enlightenment. I finally get it. roman_mir is a Sith. Only they deal in absolutes. Also, evil.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
The last time France had >38C temperatures over 14,000 elderly died, many in understaffed hospital wards while government employees were on vacation.
third world indeed
There is no usable public transit system, and what there is smells of urine and feels highly dangerous
Stay away from public transit; that's for 'students' and the welfare state's underclass which are increasingly synonymous and equally dangerous to phone/pad/laptop/credit-card equipped business people. We drive cars in the US.
The power lines are not buried, they are just haphazardly strung up on big poles all over
New construction (<30 years old) doesn't look like that -- power lines are buried. Existing infrastructure doesn't get improved. Municipalities and their quasi-goverment power companies have better things to spend their lavish budgets on than burying power lines.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Hypochondria certainly can be a bitch. The mind is a powerful thing.
"But this one goes to 11!"
There is generally FEMA funding available for burying wires.
Every time a hurricane hits St. Croix (U.S. Virgin Islands - an unincorporated U.S. Territory), they allocate funding for burying the wires. 80% of it finds its way into various pockets, and the 20% left over goes to balancing the wires back up on poles for the next hurricane.
Quite the little income generator, for the people with the pockets.
We are arguing the exact same thing, but from different angles. Your belief is that the free-market is the cure, not a perfect one, but better than government. Mine is the polar opposite. I do understand what freedom is. My freedom is to choose to not let the free-market make my decisions, based on what would be profitable this month. I choose to be altruistic and not say fuck the rest of you people. I choose to think for myself and not just consume. I choose to get involved in government, because believe it or not, you can impact it if you want to. I understand the accumulation of wealth and power, economics, production, money and freedom. believe it or not, my views are just different from yours. Am I wrong? Maybe. Are you? Also, maybe. There are advanced degrees sitting on my wall. That doesn't necessarily mean I know everything, or that I'm right. It just means that I have done my homework.
Realistically, we are hashing out the chicken versus the egg argument. Did business screw up the government, or did government pervert the businesses? My opinion is that government started regulating business, it was less profitable, so businesses put their money where they could have the most impact - fucking up the system.
My argument is that MONEY and business have corrupted what we have here in the US. My morals tell me that the law is in place for two reasons: To make sure the government doesn't step over the line - absolutely; and to make sure that businesses leave me alone, don't screw up too much, and do good by the public.
What you call greed, I call basic desire of humans for better life. Individuals address that by working, that's what they do absent gov't. Gov't destroys the ability of people to be self-sustainable, self-respecting individuals, breaks their legs, hands them crutches and says: see, without me you wouldn't be able to walk. Vote for me.
And NOPE. Government exists to make sure that itself, you, and everyone around can't fuck me into the ground. It exists to make sure that Joe Billionaire isn't employing children because they're cheaper. Is it always good? No, absolutely not. Is it better than letting profit figure out what's best for me? Yes, absolutely.
I have never seen complete state control, but I honestly don't believe that we are anywhere near that right now. Anyone who would argue that is just fear-mongering. BUT, you are right, I have made up my mind --- I've seen what privatization and profit motivation can do. Granted, it was briefly, but I was present for the dismantling of the public sector that took place in South America (I got the F out before SHTF). As you said in your post, I will never, ever see that happen again. Ever. My family won't suffer like that, and I won't go through it again. YOUR profit doesn't allow you to starve my family.
Constitutional. It doesn't mean what you think it means. To you it is a barrier against getting something you believe you are entitled to from others.
No, it means exactly what I think it means. Allowed by the constitution. Is there another definition? And no, the constitution is not a barrier for my entitlement. It is a barrier that keeps businesses, churches, cults, and yes, the government, from living my life for me. It has nothing to do with entitlement. It has everything to do with you throwing out an off-topic response that still seems out of place, thanks.
Either way, you say tomato (short 'a'), I say tomato (long 'a'). We see the same problem, but from vastly different angles. There really is no convincing either of us to the other's belief system, but it's a beautiful country whose government allows this rational discourse, correct?
Thanks for the debate!
Only is that same land is next to a big river, lake or sea. That's not a huge deal because economies of scale mean you don't want a lot of little nuclear power stations anyway, just a few huge ones (maybe small reactors but several to make a large installation and share turbines etc), so there's more than enough sites to fit the cooling needs. However we do have a rather stupid and entirely pointless myth that the things can be placed anywhere, and comparative land use arguments like the above are skating pretty close to that.
Anyway, IMHO, a mixture of energy sources makes sense, and I had that one confirmed in the mid 1990s when I was one of many trying to get around the problem of diminishing quantities of cooling water for an inland power station. The "quick fix" took more than five years and was then lost after about six months when politicians gave all the water away to local farmers, so nearly twenty years later another pipeline was built for another "quick fix" and a new government is probably going to take the water away as soon as it's dry enough to need it.
Here's basically my point. Expensive infastructure occurs when there are large areas of moderate density. It's cheap (per person) to deliver services to highly dense areas of people, and there simply aren't enough people to be globally costly in very sparsely populated areas. The use has about half the country's land area that's moderately populated (meaning good services must be delivered to a huge spread of land). Europe is mostly densely populated, while Australia has only a small swath of moderate to dense population:
http://keep3.sjfc.edu/students/jmm02377/e-port/populatilon-density%20australia.gif
The vast majority of the population lives 100 miles or less inland on the South Eastern coast (there are other places, but very little of the population lives far from the coast even in those other places). And while there are isolated towns like Alice Springs, the are quite few and far between by American Standards.
In the US, moderately dense infastructure must basically cover the entire Eastern half of the country.
http://www.census.gov/dmd/www/pdf/512popdn.pdf
This is much more costly. Yes, it would be cheaper to not have made policies that caused all the wealthy people to leave the cities, for lower density housing all around them, but those decisions were mostly made generations before now (with the results of those decisions forcing future ones).
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.