Al Gore Group Urges Obama to Create U.S. Power Grid

[Hissyspit]

Source: Reuters

Al Gore group urges Obama to create U.S. power grid

By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent – 2 hrs 42 mins ago

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection has some environmental advice for the incoming Obama administration: focus on energy efficiency and renewable resources, and create a unified U.S. power grid.

On Thursday, the group Gore founded rolled out a new media campaign to push for immediate investments in three energy areas it maintains would help meet Gore's previously announced challenge to produce 100 percent clean electricity in the United States in a decade.

Pegged to Obama's election victory on Tuesday, the Gore group's ads on television, in newspapers and online, pose the question, "Now what?"

"Our nation just made history," one video says. "We have an historic opportunity to boost our economy and repower America with 100 percent clean electricity within 10 years. It will create new American jobs, end our addiction to dirty coal and foreign oil and solve the climate crisis." More information on the campaign is available online at http://repoweramerica.org .


Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20081107/pl_nm/us_usa_electi...

[SpiralHawk]

1. "Unify the grid!" - American Electrons

[orwell]

2. This is a non-partisan goal...

...that would provide stimulus, jobs, national security benefits, global warming benefits, productivity benefits, and political benefits.

It is a no-brainer and a very good starting point for the new administration.

[FatDave]

7. But it's non-military spending.

The pukes will fight it.

[Dont_Bogart_the_Pretzel]

15. What if we paint all the new buildings ArmyGreen?

[jcg996]

3. My man Al is on the money

once again.

[Sinistrous]

4. I believe President-elect Obama set this as a priority during his campaign.

[YvonneCa]

12. Yep. I heard that, too...

... .

[blue_onyx]

5. Gore is right

This would solve several problems: oil dependency, economy/job losses, and global warming. I know Michigan could really use these jobs...instead of making cars, we could switch our closed plants to make wind turbines. I hope Obama focuses on this.

[YvonneCa]

13. Gore is ABSOLUTELY right. I'd bet...

...Obama knows it.

[elifino]

6. Here is another reason to upgrade the grid

COLUMBIA RIVER GORGE - Wind turbines are the hottest rage in 'going green' but the technology has a dangerous side for endangered salmon in the Columbia River.

No one is saying wind power is bad by any stretch - it will play a huge role in producing sustainable, green energy.

For example, the new Rattlesnake Road Wind Farm at the eastern end of the Columbia River will produce enough power to light 30,000 homes and will prevent the annual emission of 70,000 tons of carbon dioxide, which is equivalent to taking 7,000 cars off the road.

And the blueprint for wind energy in the Northwest, known as the Wind Integration Plan, calls for even more wind power online by 2009.

But while all that sounds great, it is important to understand that there are serious concerns to consider.

You see, when the wind is really blowing and the farms are operating at maximum capacity, the present system will not be able to handle all of that electricity, which ultimately affects fish.

Link to story http://www.katu.com/news/33967994.html

[1776Forever]

8. 2003 was a huge issue when the North East & CA was affected by an Ohio electric gird problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_North_America_blackou...

The Northeast Blackout of 2003 was a massive widespread power outage that occurred throughout parts of the Northeastern and Midwestern United States, and Ontario, Canada on Thursday, August 14, 2003, at approximately 4:15 pm EDT (20:15 UTC), with virtually full restoration by the following day. At the time, it was the most widespread electrical blackout in history.<1><2> The blackout affected an estimated 10 million people in the Canadian province of Ontario and 40 million people in eight U.S. states.

(snip)

Findings -

In February 2004, the U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force released their final report, placing the main cause of the blackout on FirstEnergy Corporation's failure to trim trees in part of its Ohio service area. The report said that a generating plant in Eastlake, Ohio (a suburb of Cleveland) went offline amid high electrical demand, and that strained high-voltage power lines (located in a distant rural setting) later went out of service when they came in contact with "overgrown trees". The cascading effect that resulted ultimately forced the shutdown of more than 100 power plants.<10>

Computer failure

The Task Force also found that FirstEnergy did not take remedial action or warn other control centers until it was too late, because of a software bug in General Electric Energy's Unix-based XA/21 energy management system<11> that prevented alarms from showing on their control system.<12> This alarm system stalled because of a race condition bug.<13> After the alarm system failed silently without being noticed by the operators, unprocessed events (that had to be checked for an alarm) started to queue up and the primary server failed within 30 minutes. Then all applications (including the stalled alarm system) were automatically transferred to the backup server, which also failed due to the same reason as the primary one. After this time (14:54), all applications on these two servers stopped working. Another effect of the failing servers was that the screen refresh rate of the operators' computer consoles slowed down from 1-3 seconds to 59 seconds per screen.<14>

.......

Much more at the wikipedia link - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_North_America_blackou...

[qwlauren35]

16. Sounds like a "Con"... has it been taken care of?

Or is it still a valid reason to delay a national grid?

[1776Forever]

17. I don't think it was a "con" and I think we should have a national grid. Just makes sense. Link..

Energy Policy & the Environment Report
October 2008

http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/eper_03.htm

The Million-Volt Answer to Oil

by Peter W. Huber

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Electricity—not oil—is the heart of the U.S. energy economy. Power plants consume as much raw energy as oil delivers to all our cars, trucks, planes, homes, factories, offices, and chemical plants. Because big power plants operate very efficiently, they also deliver much more useful power than car engines and small furnaces. Electricity is comparatively cheap, we have abundant supplies and reliable access to the fuels we use to generate it, and the development of wind, solar, and other renewables will only expand our homegrown options. Our capital-intensive, technology-rich electrical infrastructure also keeps getting smarter and more efficient. With electricity, America controls its own destiny.

From the beginning, electricity has progressively displaced other forms of energy where factories, offices, and ordinary people end up using it day to day. Electrification has been propelled not by government mandates or subsidies but by normal market forces and rapid innovation in technologies that turn electricity into heat and motion. Over 60 percent of our GDP now comes from industries and services that run on electricity, and over 85 percent of the growth in U.S. energy demand since 1980 has been supplied by electricity. And the electrification of the U.S. economy isn’t over. Electrically powered heaters, microwave systems, and lasers outperform oil- and gas-fired ovens in manufacturing and industrial applications, and with the advent of plug-in hybrids, electricity is now poised to begin squeezing oil out of the transportation sector.

.........

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter W. Huber is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a columnist for Forbes magazine. He is the author of numerous books and articles on energy, the environment, science and technology, legal policy, scientific evidence, and telecommunications. He taught mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and clerked for Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, and for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the U.S. Supreme Court. He has a Ph.D. from MIT, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. His most recent book, co-authored with Mark P. Mills, is The Bottomless Well (Basic Books, 2005).

.........

Much more at the link with graphs and information on wind power, etc.

[Best_man23]

9. An infrastructure stimulus bill to make this (and other projects) happen

Would be far, far more beneficial to Americans (and America) than sending out checks. It would employ people of all skill levels in real jobs that pay living wages.

[pberq]

10. Investing in clean energy will do a lot more to

protect the security of America than starting unnecessary wars

[Ian David]

11. I just hope T. Douche Pickens isn't part of this plan. n/t

[YvonneCa]

14. Think of the JOBS this would create at a time when...

...our country really needs to replace all those industrial jobs that are going away! This would be SO good for the country.

[KamaAina]

18. Not gonna be easy -- and no one knows it better than President Obama

who, you will recall, was born and raised in the state that is composed of several islands 2,400 miles offshore from California. Even getting the whole state on one grid has so far posed an insuperable obstacle: at one point, they were going to try and build a cable from Hawai'i (Big Island) to O'ahu to export some of the ggeothermal power found down there by the volcano. Hasn't happened yet.

[Uncle Joe]

19. I believe this to be an outstanding idea for at least three reasons.

1. To save life as we know it, if there wasn't any other reason, this one alone should suffice. The escalating loss of species; plants and animals, many of which we're only beginning to understand and which may also hold cures to disease and human affliction. Once they're gone, they're gone for good and when too many of them are gone, we can't be far behind.

2. The economy would get a major boost as this is the most logical wave of the future, creating multitudes of, constructive, functional, productive jobs from high tech to basic labor.

3. National security, even the military acknowledges the implications of continually relying on fossil fuels controlled in large part by foreign nations, and the increasing threat of global warming climate change, first to our economy, then to our society as climate catastrophe refugees overwhelm our systems. A commander in Iraq has even called for his base to be supplied with solar energy to keep convoys of fossil fuel from continually getting hit by IEDs.

Thanks for the thread, Hissyspit.

Kicked and recommended.

[robinlynne]

20. Go Al go!!!!!!!!!!!

[Pastiche423]

21. I liked "Run, Al Run!" better

But, Go Al go is good too!

[robinlynne]

22. I like your signature.

[hedgehog]

23. I'm for this as long as safeguards are put into place to protect people

from private companies using eminent domain to seize property. There is an outfit attempting to run a power line to carry power from Quebec across New York down to NYC. New York turned the route down, and now the company is making an end run by going to the Federal government.

Someone is going to be unhappy regardless of where power lines are run. We just need to ensure that proper safeguards are put into place.

[Quantess]

24. Can you imagine where we would be as a nation

if Gore had been our president?

[lunatica]

25. California passed it's high speed rail initiative, powered by electricity

It will connect San Diego to Sacramento via all stops along the Central Valley corridor and San Francisco.

http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/11/california-vote.html

[goforit]

26. Now this could amplify the number of jobs available.

[Igel]

27. There are a few issues here.

"100% renewable energy" and "unified power grid" are separate things. We could have one without the other.

"Unified power grid" and "modern power grid" are also separate things. There are only really three grids in the US, and I'm not sure that two of them are entirely separate. But connections between subcomponents are weak, usually for one of two reasons--there's no need for stronger connections, or the regulations and planning process for putting up long-range transmission lines makes it unworkable. Take Texas--until fairly recently cities were run in a self-contained fashion, with power transfers between them limited or only sometimes needed. So Houston's power grid is connected to the one in Austin and San Antonio, but there's not a tight connection--only so much power could flow. There are calls for building more, but they're expensive (and rate increases are not likely to be happily accepted by people), and acquiring right of way could be tricky.

When I lived in west New York they talked of the need for a transmission line running near Rome to NYC to get power to NYC, but nobody wanted it in their backyards, and so it probably died. The feds had the authority to declare it a priority, but the dem senators and representatives all but pitched a fit, and neither Pataki nor Spitzer wanted it built (or, rather, they wanted it to have already been built, so it wouldn't be a problem). The response was small power plants scattered around the city, but given the NIMBYism rampant there, most wound up in poor communities, not where they were needed. California had the same problem in the late '90s and early '00s--enough power in the state, just not able to get where it was needed (and, yes, California has a unified power grid, thank you).

Of course, the obvious example is the '03 power cut in the NE. It's obvious there's a unified grid there ... otherwise a problem in Ohio wouldn't have knocked out power in NYC. That's the downside. As it is, no amount of stupidity in Texas could knock out power elsewhere, and vice-versa, because Texas is not on either of the two larger grids surrounding it.

So "unified" might be good, but isn't really all that necessary, at least as Gore means it (which would mean extensive government control and regulation, the real issue and one that arguing for simple "unification" overlooks). "Modern" would be nice for a change. And "renewable" would certainly be an improvement.

One map of the US electrical grids:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/chg_stru_updat...

[excess_3]

28. foolish idea

Northeast only blackouts
better than countrywide

[jpak]

29. That was caused by an antiquated grid

and is the reason why it should be upgraded.