Paul Chesser reports at NLPC.org:
Duke Energy’s “green” initiative to gasify coal for allegedly “cleaner” burning at its Edwardsport, Ind. power plant has already been vilified for cronyism, corruption, conflicts of interest, cost overruns, delays, waste, and mismanagement, but at least it became operational in June.
For six days.
Faith is fraud. It is the pretense of knowledge without the fact of knowledge.
I’ll go along with three of five. “Creationism” covers a lot of territory; of course most of the creation stories are only that, but if you extend creationism to the concept of a powerful entity creating the universe from nothing, that becomes mysticism or faith rather than fraud. Unknowable at this point.
If by “climate change denialism” you mean a skeptical attitude toward human production of CO2 producing harmful affects in climate and weather, I flat out refute you. Empirical observation supports the skeptical view more than the credulous view.
Everyone with some knowledge knows that climate does change, of course, but that’s not likely what you meant.
With interstate connections I think loss of scale is minimal. Load shifting arrangements (i.e. reciprocal arrangements where one power company sells power actually generated on contract by another) between the power generators might help as well. My post was about the general approach to this, not a detailed plan.
We do it all the time in the oil industry. Do you really think everyone has their own independent pipeline network? You meter what goes in, and you meter what goes out. At the end of the month, you sit down and hash out any discrepancies.
In fact, that is already what is happening in electricity in Texas. Once the system was deregulated, anyone can make and sell power. However, no matter what power company I buy from, Centerpoint delivers it. However, the promised price decreases haven’t materialized. That’s a bit of a question for a different thread.
Perhaps, but this model might be better for integrating new producers with differing power generation technologies into the system.
You would lose economy of scale.
You would regulate to separate generation processes from transmission processes. The transmission lines would be common carriers for power, much like the ATT system used to function as long distance common carrier for regional phone companies. The generating companies would be forced to compete in terms of reliability and cost to the consumer. The consumer becomes a valuable actor for the generators then.
Robert Heinlein’s here in “Farnham’s Freehold” mentions that he had worked for a public futility…
I dunno how one could create competition in public utilities. It seems difficult to compete for who will produce and distribute water, gas or electricity over an existing network and it seems it would be difficult to create competing networks. Cable distributors have figured out ways to do it but that’s very different technology.
In the absence of real competition and the opportunity for profits more closely related to efficient delivery of value, public utilities more easily become political creatures and the outcomes are situations like this.