Welcome to DU! The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards. Join the community: Create a free account Support DU (and get rid of ads!): Become a Star Member Latest Breaking News General Discussion The DU Lounge All Forums Issue Forums Culture Forums Alliance Forums Region Forums Support Forums Help & Search

Yo_Mama

(8,303 posts)
5. This bill is bad for much of GA
Sun Feb 26, 2012, 12:39 AM
Feb 2012

The reason is that it would divert the profits to a select group with money (the investors), but stick the average poor joe with higher energy bills.

The reason it would do that is that the energy would be funneled into the system anywhere, but the infrastructure doesn't exist to handle the line voltages in large swathes of the state. A lot of GA is rural, and the line capacity isn't there. But the rural areas are the places where people would do this. This means that the utilities would not get the benefit of lower peak costs, but would be stuck with all of the line maintenance costs, which means that consumers would not get the benefit.

GA has large line installation costs - mostly we bury the lines for any new development. That's because of our terrain and our storms. This means that the utilities, which would have to deal with the line costs, would be left without the revenue to do it. It is relatively far more expensive to build a mile of power lines in GA than in many parts of the country, but over time the utilities minimize their total costs with far less maintenance (and the residents profit by highly reliable power).

This means that most of GA is very poorly suited to this type of scheme. Essentially the utilities would be stuck buying power they can't use, and the people doing this would ultimately get screwed too, because over time it wouldn't pay off but that wouldn't be obvious at first.

The ways to do this would be to form local coops that could invest in energy storage from the new facilities which could be used to offset peak power. It would be far cheaper to run some lines to a local regional area that could then dump voltage back into the local grid during high demand times. However the net investment costs to do this would have to include the cost of the storage facilities and the cost of the line updates feeding into that storage facility.

The pile of rocks heat pump scheme would work very well in most of GA.
http://www.isentropic.co.uk/

Latest Discussions»Issue Forums»Environment & Energy»The heated debate over so...»Reply #5