Free Republic

If you ask the people who run America's electric utilities what keeps them up at night, a surprising number will say solar power. Specifically, rooftop solar. That seems bizarre at first. Solar power provides just 0.4 percent of electricity in the United States — a minuscule amount. Why would anyone care? But utilities see things differently. As solar technology gets dramatically cheaper, tens of thousands of Americans are putting photovoltaic panels up on their roofs, generating their own power. At the same time, 43 states and Washington DC have "net metering" laws that allow solar-powered households to sell their excess...

To understand why revitalizing Detroit will be difficult, consider the response to the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department’s (DWSD) recent plan to make overdue customers pay their bills. The DWSD serves more than 4 million customers across the Detroit region. The suburbs mostly buy water from the DWSD wholesale, so it’s mainly city residents and businesses who get billed directly, and over half of them—about 90,000 customers—haven’t paid up. Total past-due bills add up to nearly $90 million, with the average delinquent residential customer owing $540, or more than 7 months’ worth of service, based on an average bill of...

Unfortunately, competition is under attack in my beloved Wisconsin when it comes to energy choice. For the state where I grew up watching my father decry and fight like hell against the ruinous policies of Robert LaFollette Jr., who turned the state into a progressive “paradise” of which only Karl Marx and Gus Hall could be proud, I want nothing more than a vibrant competitive market. While Gov. Scott Walker has done more than any other Wisconsin governor in recent memory to undo policies that threaten competition, he’s missing the boat on energy choice in the state.

Why spend so much time commenting on Detroit? Because the city of more than 700,000 people is bankrupt, turning the water off on over one hundred thousand water customers, and now axing the contracts of nonprofit human service groups that have been providing safety net services for Detroit’s legions of poor people residing in devastated neighborhoods. Is there any hope? Inell Byrd, a 41-year-old home health aide still living in Detroit’s North End, told New York Times writer James Eligon, “I know the city is coming back.” That was the concluding sentence of Eligon’s moving portrait of residents of the...

Watch out, Detroit. Here comes the United Nations. WND has learned that after issuing a statement last week condemning Detroit’s decision to send water shut-off notices to tens of thousands of customers behind in their payments, the U.N now plans to conduct confidential policy discussions with the Obama administration to be followed by a formal public report to the U.N. Human Rights Council. On Monday, the U.N. Human Rights Council’s office in Geneva confirmed to WND that the U.N. plans to intervene directly in the Detroit water crisis, determined to apply international law to judge the U.S. in violation of...

In the early days of the Obama administration, “smart power” was all the rage—and not just on the foreign policy scene. In April 2009, National Public Radio reported how one Allentown, Pennsylvania, mother was saving more than a hundred dollars each month on her electric bill. Tammy Yeakel’s power company, PPL Energy, had helpfully installed a “smart meter” on her home that could monitor her power usage in real time. The meter uploaded that information to PPL’s website, so she could identify peak usage times during the day

After a blistering four-month rally that took stocks to record highs last year, January could not have been more different, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) fell more than 5%. In the first month of the year, traders worried the financial health of both the U.S. and smaller nations meant stocks were too dangerous to continue owning for the time being, especially after a nearly uninterrupted rise that began in early 2009. Those jitters continued on the first trading day in February, driven by weakness in a manufacturing index from the Institute for Supply Management. By the close of...

Utility crews from Maine to Michigan and into Canada worked Wednesday to restore power to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses left in the dark by last weekend's ice storm, and people slowly trickled out of shelters to spend Christmas Day at their finally warm homes. But not everyone was so lucky, including Ashley Walter, who was forced to spend Christmas at a shelter in a school in Litchfield with her husband, Jacob Walter, and their month-old daughter, Leah. The family lost power on Saturday, got it back and then lost it again Sunday. Ashley Walter and Leah stay...

Florida Power & Light and its sister company, NextEra Energy Resources, will eliminate 1,000 positions or 6.7 percent of their combined, nationwide workforce during the next two years, as part of an effort to improve efficiency and enhance the use of technology, the utility said Wednesday. A total of about 160 workers are expected to lose their jobs, with the remaining 840 cuts coming from the elimination of open positions, early retirement and normal attrition, said FPL President Eric Silagy. It is not yet known how many of the total job losses will be in Florida, but 60 of 80...

Prepare For The Coming Cyber Wars: US Government To Launch Pre-Emptive Cyber Strikes Robert Richardson February 5th, 2013 Off Grid Survival For years we have warned our readers about the dangers that a full scale cyber-attack could have on our infrastructure; now those dangers are even higher as the Federal Government prepares to launch Pre-emptive cyber strikes against rogue nations. According to the New York Times, President Barack Obama has just concluded a secret legal review of the administration’s new cyber war guidelines. The guidelines give President Obama the power to order pre-emptive cyber strikes to protect national security interests....

WASHINGTON – The United States now is facing two serious national security challenges, but they aren’t expected to be addressed effectively because of the serious budgetary headaches Congress has created, and a virtually deadlocked legislature on just about every issue pending, according to report from Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin. And the White House apparently isn’t paying attention. The first is the growing concern of the impact that an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, event – either natural or manmade – could have on the national grid system, on which the Department of Defense has a 99 percent dependency. The other concern...

The futures don’t look so hot this morning before the opening bell. As of 8:50 a.m. EST, Dow futures are down nearly 70 points. S&P and NASDAQ futures look pretty much as bad, down nearly 9 and 20 points respectively. While yesterday’s action seemed relatively benign, it wasn’t, as lots of sectors were getting hammered but, due to low semi-holiday volume, this wasn’t readily apparent. Our utilities got hit so hard we had to exit via percentage stops, and we’ll probably need to pare back what energy and banking issues we still have today. The “fiscal cliff” again is the...

02:34 AM Via Twitchy, read about Alabama TV station WAFF’s report on non-union utility crews who traveled from the South to help restore power to Hurricane Sandy victims — only to be turned away because they were non-union.

The Massachusetts attorney general is seeking a nearly $10 million in fines from electric utility NStar for what she calls "inadequate" responses to two major storms last year that left hundreds of thousands of customers without power, some for days. Attorney General Martha Coakley's office made the recommendation in a brief filed Tuesday with the Department of Public Utilities, which has the authority to impose the fine. The attorney general says NStar failed to properly anticipate the severity of Tropical Storm Irene in August and a late October snow storm; failed to communicate effectively with customers and government officials; and...

Some two weeks after Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta warned of a potential “cyber-Pearl Harbor” involving a possible attack on the electric grid, Mother Nature took the cue and hit the East Coast with a storm that left millions of us for days without electricity from the grid. Some said silent thanks for that old generator they’d thought to stick in the garage. Though it wasn’t a cyberattack, but Mother Nature gave parts of the grid a good lashing anyway. On my country road south of Annapolis, two transformers were blown down from their perches on telephone poles, and...

Last fall’s monumental storms affected almost everyone in Connecticut. People were inconvenienced, impatient, and angry. The ill, elderly, and disabled were exposed to significant risks. We were shocked at how long it took to restore service, and how hard it was to get answers. First responders and town organizations rose to the occasion, but they were stretched to their limits. Schools were closed for days on end. The situation got old very fast. No one wanted to go through the same thing again, ever. Not surprisingly, there was an initial clamor for action. Several of us called for public hearings,...

As scientists warn of an impending solar storm between now and 2014 that could collapse the national power grid, thrusting millions into darkness instantly, a debate has flared up between utilities and the federal government on the severity of such an event. NASA and the National Academy of Sciences previously confirmed to G2Bulletin that an electromagnetic pulse event from an intense solar storm could occur any time between now and 2014. They say it could have the effect of frying electronics and knocking out transformers in the national electric grid system. Already, there are separate published reports of massive solar...

State lawmakers are proposing new standards for power restoration and steep penalties for utility companies that fail to meet them. "We have some of the highest electric rates in the country but we don't have the best service,'' House Speaker Chris Donovan said at a press conference this morning at the state Capitol complex. "You would think for the highest rates we would have better service.''Donovan and state Rep. Vickie Nardello, co-chairwoman of the legislature's energy and technology committee, are proposing the state Public Utilities Regulatory Authority establish a series of benchmarks for power companies. The proposal is modelled on...

(Utilities across the country need more money for grid updates and pollution controls, and are passing the huge bill on to consumers. Laura Colarusso on why electricity bills are rising.) Already weary of high gas prices and 9.1 percent unemployment, many Americans are about to get another kick in the wallet thanks to large increases in their electricity bills.From Alaska to Georgia and Wyoming to Florida, utilities are seeking permission to pass on hundreds of millions of dollars in new charges to customers to help upgrade aging infrastructure and build new or retrofitted power plants that comply with tougher environmental...

Should energy consumers pay extra taxes to fund government-mandated and subsidized renewable energy technologies? "Absolutely yes," says John Bryson, President Obama's nominee for Commerce Secretary. He made the remark at a meeting of the Commonwealth Club of California in 2009 and went on to extol the virtues of hidden rates in California, a state encumbered with some of the nation's highest electricity and unemployment rates. Bryson, retired CEO of the electric utility Southern California Edison (SCE) and its parent company Edison International, excused the practice, saying, "That's been a part of the regulatory environment for the investor-owned utilities for as...