Joe/r3dshift opined:
> I hope you're all faring well, and that you can find some peace despite the
> glaring technology void left by the power outage. I'm really sad that the
> best event in the last couple months just happened to fall on the night of
> the worst outage in history.
"Worst outage in history"? Ah, someone that didn't live through the
Great Blackout of November 1965, I see :-)
(30,000,000+ people lost power that time.)
Jamie Hurlbut dropped some science:
> Really it has to do with the deregulation of the energy industry that went
> on in this country around 1998. The US, with its faith in the market,
> decided it would be good to treat essential human services as commodities
> to be bought and sold for profit, making the electricity system as volatile
> as the stock market. In fact the energy wholesalers (people like Enron and
> Global Crossing, you know those companies that stole billions from
> taxpayers and employees and got a slap on the wrist?) are at an incentive
> to keep the system dangerously low in reserves, because they are paid more
> for providing reserve energy (that is energy below 18% of the capacity of
> the system) than they are for providing energy above the 18% checkmark.
>
> This means that after 1998 the local energy market in NY state was
> providing only around 10% of the capacity of the system, the rest was
> distributed from out of state investors or wholesalers, most of it from
> Canada who makes a lot of income by providing power to the US. This is what
> happened here in California a year and a half ago when Enron was busy
> shuttling power in and out of California getting paid for the energy each
> time it entered the state and other dirty tricks. Of course the Bush
> administration will use this as an excuse to build more power plants and
> rush the permitting process, sidelining any weak environmental standards
> and community issues still in place. Welcome to neocon xtreme capitalism,
> where even terrorist threats get sold on the market!
Post of the Year. Succinct and oh-so-true. It's unbelievable how evil
this stuff truly is. California is the laughing stock of the world -
we're now having a circus erm ... I mean, a "recall election" in part
because Governor Gray Davis is such a panzy that he allowed us to get
caught up in buying electricity contracts (after Enron scr*wed us) for
4 times the going rate because our backs were to the wall. Whee!
Ob313: The blackout prevented the first Iggy & The Stooges show in
Michigan in 30 years.
- Greg
