Posted on 07/28/2013 7:05:21 AM PDT by BenLurkin
WOODBRIDGE, Conn. (CBSNewYork) — The town of Woodbridge, Conn., is one of several that has received state grants for a “micro grid” to maintain power to crucial utilities in the event of a storm blackout.
As WCBS 880’s reported, restoring power often takes time when outages hit Woodbridge. The rural community is filled with trees and wires.
First Selectwoman Ellen Scalettar said having an energy source to provide power to critical town buildings and services will provide the town’s 10,000 residents with a sense of security – knowing that no matter how fierce the storm, central power will be up.
“In Woodbridge, many people have well water and septic systems, so in a bad storm when we lose electricity, we lose water and septic and we have to be able to get to shelters and places of common accommodation for basic services,” Scalettar said.
Woodbridge town officials are hoping the new micro grid will be up and running within a year or so.
How a Microgrid Works
by Robert Lamb
http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/energy/microgrid.htm
Might be cheaper to buy a few Generators.
Wouldn't be simpler to trim the trees?
/johnny
“The rural community is filled with trees and wires. “
How about cutting some trees down?
When I worked for a local utility and we attempted preventative trimming, we had a woman bolt out of her house and call us ‘murderers” at the top of her lungs.
These are the same people that scream the loudest when their power doesn’t get restored immediately after a storm.
I watched the same scenario be replayed over and over for years.
When you suggested that some trimming was necessary to cut down on outages you would swear you were asking to kill one of their puppies.
I’ve seen that video several times. Each time I see it, I won’t some sense knocked into those enviro-idiots.
Woodbridge is a wealthy suburb of New Haven where doctors, lawyers, and Yale professors like to live.
They like the trees because it makes them feel like they have privacy.
Most are lacking in common sense, but that should have been obvious from my first sentence.
Me too. In fact I have two of them. Both are pretty small and I use them to power my power tools at times, but they keep the lights on and power the furnace and the water pump.
This whole micro-grid thing sounds suspect. How can it be more efficient to generate electricity from thousands of local power stations than a few centrally located ones? Sure there are losses in transmissions, but what losses are there in building thousands of power plants?
The article seems to assume that sometime next week we'll have developed much better solar, wind, and fuel cell technology, and that somehow these systems will require no energy to build.
Also the only way that solar and wind can make any sense at all because of the large swings in the amount of power they generate, is if their outputs are mixed in with a huge quantity of power that can absorb and distribute those waves (or more like ripples) of power to the places that need it.
If a small micro-grid depended primarily on solar and wind power they would have to build some sort of huge storage system (batteries, flywheels, dams to hold water pumped up hill, etc.) to manage the swings.
And where are these solar panels, windmills, fuel cells, etc. manufactured for these small micro-grids? Are they cobbled together in the garages of town residents? Do old ladies get together in "knitting circles" to create solar quilts?
This is all such infuriating nonsense.
That article is a bunch of green Agenda 21 BS.
So the police state . . . of the art surveillance equipment will continue to work even if there’s a blackout?
Assume those making fun of the microgrid also make fun of preppers. Or maybe they just trust big brother to take care of us, come what may, and that the cellphone, power, and interwebs run by majik.
Having redundant power and local peaker or muni generating capacity is a plus when it comes to securing employers who have data centers.
“in a bad storm when we lose electricity, we lose water and septic”
“The rural community is filled with trees and wires.”
The selectwoman does not appear to be very bright...
A septic tank functions just fine without electricity-pour a bucket of water into the toilet bowl to flush if the pump isn’t running because the power is out...
And the tree limbs near the wires-which are located in the utility easement-are trimmed each winter by a professional service here-doesn’t every rural county do that?
Is there really anyone outside of a major city who does not keep at least 50 gallons of water on hand for washing and toilet flushing, plus enough bottled drinking water for a week? Anyone who does not have at least the most primitive of rain-capture systems-a couple of clean, large garbage cans under a roof overhang or gutter?
The point is that people don’t want to constantly be collecting and storing water for a power outage. They want to be able to take regular showers. And really, in CT, as significant as the question of water is the question of heat.
I can only look at it from the viewpoint of a country-raised Texan in a rural area-but if you want total convenience all the time, you buy a generator, as some of the posters suggested, or live in a city or town of good size. CT just doesn’t sound like the kind of “rural living” I’m used to. It sounds more like a city person’s idea of “roughing it”.
I didn’t see heat mentioned, but in an area of snowy winters, that is a real concern. Winter is mild here compared to CT, but everyone I know has at least one woodstove or fireplace, and buys a cord of firewood each Fall or gets permission to cut storm downed-or-dead trees on someone’s ranch.
There was no furnace in our ranch house, but there were a couple of fireplaces and a woodstove, and a space heater in the bathroom.
I’ll be building my next home to be off-grid-with solar power, and all of that stuff-not something I imagine would go over well in CT.
Yep, not much actually “rural rural” in CT at all. It is overwhelmingly suburban with different degrees of rural-to-urban feel.
Many comfortably-off house owners have got generators here over the past several years, as the frequency of outages seems to have gone up throughout New England. Others simply check into a hotel when there’s a storm coming.
Power companies will say it has to do with local limits on their chopping down or severely trimming trees; residents, on the utilities scrimping on repairs.
The idea of solar would be popular in purple-to-blue state CT, but the days of full sun here are limited.
Yeah us peons will feel oh so much safer knowing that the First Select Woman will have power in her powder room while we all shiver in the dark.
Of course we could spend the money putting in buried power lines so everyone would have power, but then what good would it be to be a First select person if everyone has power?
She does not want to put in Generators, she wants to put in the infrastructure so she can tap everyone else’s generators. Think of it as a direct energy tax to keep the lights and heat on in city hall.
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