Rick Perry has directed the Department of Energy to do a 60-day study of the U.S. electric grid. While the memo was not publicized, it was obtained by various news sources. I was unable to find it online, but I managed to get a copy and put up as a page on my blog for those who want to see.
One of the wonderful things we have in the Vermont is a real democracy, in which the voice of the people can be heard. The Representative Town Meeting of Brattleboro, Vermont voted on the following motion, which I brought to the floor on March 25, 2017:
By the early 1900s, express passenger trains were fast enough that their stopping distances were well over a mile. At such a distance, if the engineer of a train saw something blocking the track ahead, it was usually already too late to stop the train in time to avoid a collision.
As a former conservative Republican (in fact, a former NRA life member), I believe I am as disappointed as any Democrat by what I am seeing in Washington today. The White House and Congress are not guided by any conservative thinking or traditional belief system. It is not the good of the economy or the safety of the people that guides them. It is not about America being first; they are giving away our leading place in the world to China and have an as-yet-unexplained relationship with Russia.
Americans pay billions of dollars each year in hidden taxes. No one asked for them. No one voted for them. No legislature passed them into law. But they are real, and we all pay them, whether we like it or not. The really horrible thing about these hidden taxes is that they are increasing dramatically and could even cause an economic meltdown. I will give a couple of examples.
Nearly 10 months ago, Tony Seba, author of the 2014 book Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation, posted a video on YouTube, “CleanDisruption.” In both, he projected that a nearly complete disruption of the energy business would begin in 2020 and be well underway by 2022, the year he projects for distributed solar power with battery backup to fall below the cost of transmitting electricity. It is a point at which centralized power plants, if they are to compete with solar-plus-storage, will have to provide power for free. He believes that all centralized electric power producers will be obsolete by 2030, as will conventional cars and utility companies.
We’ve seen a lot of commentary on the fact that utility-scale solar power has become the least expensive source of electricity in many places. There is more than that to be found in the data in Lazard’s Levelized Cost of Energy Analysis, Version 10.0, however, and what it tells us is that solar and wind power have benefits apart from the simple facts that their costs are low.
All the customers of Cape Light Compact, in the 21 communities on Cape Cod and the island of Martha’s Vineyard, will get 100% of their electric power from renewable sources by the end of January 2017.
