Bfgrn
Gold Member
- Apr 4, 2009
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All of this is YOUR opinion.Have you noticed that YOU out of the hundreds of liberal users on this forum, are the ONLY one defending this bullshit?
Have you noticed this is just another baseless fear-mongering right wing conspiracy? You people are afraid of your own shadow.
Idaho is far from a leftist haven. Yet experts - from both environmental and industry camps - agree that improving energy efficiency is the cheapest way to keep the utility's rates down. The same is true for individual customers.
Are you also afraid of the 'Floor' buttons in an elevator? Or do we need to bring back human elevator operators so you will not be so afraid?
A smart grid makes changes to supply and demand instantly, preventing power outages and brownouts that manual operators can't react to as quickly and AUTOMATICALLY.
A smart grid is LESS intrusive because it does not need human interdiction.
And the future two way capabilities will allow anyone who invests in solar or wind power, like a farmer, to sell power back to the grid.
It is FREE MARKET, not communism. You right wing turds are REALLY being led down a scurrilous path here.
Smart grid, smart meters, etc is one thing. The lazy way out.
Instead of modernizing the technology of the grid, smart regulates use. The additional costs get passed along to the customers. And we get rolling brown outs.
No thanks.
Smart meters are part of the modernization. It gives each consumer the ability to see his own power use and contol HIS costs. It will also allow people who invest in solar, wind or other home based power sources to sell his power back to the grid.
We don't have an energy grid in this country that can carry these new currents of energy. Our energy grid is antiquated. It was under-built, it is already overpowered, and it's misaligned. It doesn't reach the big wind centers in the Midwest, the solar centers in the desert southwest, and it's small. It is dumb. It's a dumb grid and it's incapable of doing long whole transmission of energy. Virtually every farmer in the state of North Dakota wants to put wind turbines on their property, and you have huge mountains of private capital, big players like Siemens and Vestas and General Electric and Warren Buffet and T. Boone Pickens all want to go there. There's huge piles of cash surrounding the state of North Dakota, waiting to build turbines on every property. Every farm in North Dakota wants to build a turbine. Why? Because a North Dakota cornfield is worth $800. If it's got a wind turbine on it, it's worth 3,000. We have the ability now with wind, to create prosperity in declining world economies, to create jobs and to enrich farmers and to allow them to hold on to their farms, which is a really critical part of democracy.
The problem is the North Dakota wind farmer cannot get his product to market -- the electrons to market because the electrons will diffuse in our current lines before they cross the North Dakota border. So they can't reach Cincinnati or Cleveland, Columbus, Saint Louis, New Orleans or New York. And we need to build a unified national grid that will connect these renewable power generation centers to the markets in our country, the same way that Eisenhower built the national highway systems back in the 60s. We need to do that with the grid and we need to build the smart grid.