Hi Gene, Sorry, I didn't have time yesterday to respond to you. I didn't mean to ignore you, and thank you for the info. I have talked to people at the public service commission and at the consumer office (the director of the consumer office used to be a power plant manager). But I'd be very happy to talk to your contact. People at Rocky Mountain Power know me as the crazy Marxist from the U of U, but some of them still seem to enjoy discussing with me. In the last DSM meeting I attended I got into a good discussion about feed-in tariffs with some vice president from RMP, but the discussion had to be broken off because it was off-topic.
Utah is a net exporter of electricity. The cheap coal-fired electricity is exported to LA, and we Utahns must breathe the pollution from it. And some of our own wind and geothermal is not used here in Utah but shipped to California over expensive transmission lines, because here in Utah the coal-generated electricity is so "cheap" that our wind and geothermal cannot compete. I put "cheap" in quotation marks because it would not be cheap if the externalities, ie the healthcare costs of the children with asthma and autism, would be factored in. The capitalists get a double benefit: first they profit from overproducing dirty electricity, and then they profit from the health care bills. This is their idea of a booming economy. I don't doubt that the big utilities share and swap baseload with each other, but they are doing everything to discourage and impede distributed renewable energy. Distributed renewable energy is the outsider. All the incumbent big businesses close ranks against these outsiders, because they know that distributed renewable energy is a big threat to their profitability. And one way they can shut out renewable energy this is through their control of the transmission system. Do you know why the US has a nice interstate gas pipeline system but no interstate electric transmission system to speak of (with the exception of the HVDC line from Milford to LA you have mentioned)? In the 1930s the owners of the natural gas pipelines were caught price fixing, therefore federal regulators, the precursors of FERC, took over. FERC has oversight over electric power lines, it must approve them, but it cannot tell the states where to put them, this is why we don't have a viable interstate electric transmission system. I heard a national expert about these issues say that it will take another multi-day national power outage to make it possible for FERC to get this authority. Right now everybody is opposed, even the progressive governors don't want to cede their authority to site the transmission lines to the Federal government. And having no viable transmission grid is a big obstacle for renewable energy. They don't even have the wires to transport the wind energy from the wind belt in the midwest to neighboring Chicago! Hans _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
