Mark et al.,
Jim Lux has some points. over here in southeastern Pennsylvania (USA), the
power monopoly Exelon (although it goes by other names here and elsewhere) shut
down their local aging natural gas power plant purely on economic grounds
(maybe not the best design and some accumulation of nucleotide sludges), and
recently had to setup all kinds of substation(s) to handle diversion of the
local output from their twin nuke reactors and hyperbolic cooling towers just
around the corner. i used to drink pints with the pipe welders at the aging
gas plant -- they were going gangbusters before Exelon shut down the op, and
later i met many of the plant engineers at the nuke, who would anticipate their
Bloody Mary's after work back at the temporary housing Exelon would pay for
every 6 months. Exelon and i used the same B&B for our good folks: their
engineers and my mom. the company that provided the guards at the nuke plant
all got fired after someone squealed that they and/or the ones with machine
guns were sleeping on the job, so now we have a new contract crew on that.
i asked when i got here why electricity was so expensive given that there are
two nukes within visual inspection of our little town, and what i got back was
that the energy from them was actually being sold to Canada under some long
term contract. now we're stuck sucking tritium water dilution spills in our
local tap. the state (Commonwealth of Pennsylvania) Environmental Protection
Agency didn't even bother to let us know they had a major on-site tritium spill
that was coming up from manholes on site. Philadelphia also gets its water
from the same river, though we get it first… a local newspaper got the info on
a kind of "freedom of information" request about Exelon trying to massively
dilute the spill into the local river, to claim it got into the river just
below federal limits. i've surmised that one political party has crippled the
local agency in terms of action due to defunding or threats or something i
don't understand, it's not just this issue, but multiple issues. here,
electrical generation costs were politically brokered to basically let in
others on the generation side while infinitely extending the local delivery
monopoly (Exelon at the top) getting about half for delivery and keeping their
monopoly for crappy pole wiring that gets thwacked by aging oak and maple trees
not being trimmed before the winter storms and taking down lines during storms.
personally and professionally, i switched to solar and wind renewables on the
generation side even though my current contract costs about one cent per
kilowatt-hour more than Exelon.
maybe my cluster is only half dirty now! i try and do good with it to offset
the infrastructure. i'd move to someone's cloud with better electricity if i
could trust the security enough. i'm okay with turning 95% of the cluster off
when i don't need to compute, ala what Donald Becker said once in an email on
this list. he used to work for my father's science shop at NASA/Goddard.
there's at least another whole post on what my father told me about how screwed
up electricity generation was in California and why (he told me after he
retired), but i'll never tell that story on the web. my folks retired to a
little beach town in southern California after his retirement from NASA and a
bunch of agencies that we don't know about.
here, the ballpark figure on increased electrical costs to the end user after
so-called "deregulation" or so-called "free market" shenanigans is 20%.
douglas
On Apr 8, 2013, at 8:46 PM, Mark Hahn <h...@mcmaster.ca> wrote:
>> Energy cost will massively grow within this and next decade because of
>> decreasing oil and gas supply and rapidly growing electricity demand.
>
> I'm not sure where you get this. in north america, for instance,
> there has been a fairly dramat increase in available energy (from new
> sources of natural gas, mainly), while electrical demand has been
> *falling* for years (at least in my part of Canada).
> […]
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