Rick Callahan of the Associated Press has an article entitled Indiana’s 1st Commercial Wind Farm Online.
RAUB, Ind. — A nearly treeless stretch of northern Indiana that once produced only corn and soybeans is now dotted with 87 hulking wind turbines that harvest the region’s incessant breezes, generating enough power to light 43,000 homes.
The 130-megawatt Benton County Wind Farm – the state’s first commercial power station fueled by the wind – went online this month about 90 miles northwest of Indianapolis near the Illinois state line.
It’s the first of six that, combined, are expected to generate 3,000 megawatts. That’s about the total additional capacity Indiana needs to keep up with projected demand by 2012; though Duke Energy is not contractually obligated to use the Benton County generated power to supply Indiana needs. Indiana’s total consumption is about 113,000 gigawatts. So, it’s a pretty small fraction of the total pie. Still, it’s probably good to be developing the technology.
It isn’t up to Duke to use that power, it is up to us. You can sign up with them to have your power bought from souces such as this one by going to their GoGreen Power page.
It would even better if we had real utility choice- where we could say, “see you Duke” and “hello, Benton Co wind farm”.
These utility monopolies granted by state and local governments don’t work.
I actually like our utility regulation. I wish it extended to high-speed Internet. There we have the free market, and we fall WAY behind other countries in speed, availablility, and price.
There we have the free market, and we fall WAY behind other countries in speed, availablility, and price.
Bull.
We’re “behind” certain cities, like Seoul, where people live in apartment buildings that are more like beehives than homes.
It’s a lot easier to provide Internet service to a huge apartment building than, say, my subdivision.
But we just got AT&T’s fiber to the junction box upgrade in the neighborhood, and supposedly they’re going to be marketing 10 meg service “soon”.
None of this has anything to do with regulation, or the lack of it.
Buzzcut,
What are you using right now? We had dial-up until November because our house didn’t have cable run to it and DirectTV’s version was way too pricey. Finally got AT&T to notice our subdivision in November.
Dude, even Canada has better broadband than us. They’re 10th, we’re 12th. Also ahead of us are such urban places like the Netherlands. This isn’t “certain cities”.
If the problem is really population density, then New York and Chicago should have 100mbs connections like Paris. How do you explain the largest economy on earth (US) being behind those crazy people up ‘nort?
Souce: http://www.itif.org/files/BroadbandRankings.pdf
My point about regulation is that like water and electricty, broadband usually requires a lot of infrastructure that makes compitition hard. We might as well regulate it and get dependable, cheep broadband like we do power and water.
Rev. move to Munster. We get the good stuff, for obvious reasons.
Somebody in my neighborhood sells wireless broadband, too. A bunch of people have small antennas on their roof aimed at the water tower near 45th and Indy. Not sure how fast it is.
We’ve also got Comcast available. They’re offering 16 mbps.
Jason, even Toronto is far more urbanized than any US city. Urbanization explains the speeds, not regulation.
Chicago is covered by some half assed cable company, not Comcast.
NYC has decent broadband. My brother had Time Warner in downtown Manhattan. Cable modem, high def TV, high def DVR, the works. 2 blocks from the pit formerly known as the World Trade Center.
Jason, you need to read better blogs about regulation. Start here.
What you’re saying about regulation, fixed costs, etc. is not in any way true.
Funny enough, I’ve spent the last two years working to help AT&T install the hardware (the VRAD cabinet) necessary to get the broadband going. I worked some 300 sites in Illinois last year, including the Chicago suburbs, Decatur, Danville, and Champaign; plus Central Indiana; plus Kalamzaoo MI.
In most places, the #1 roadblock to installing the hardware is municipal government. The #2 roadblock is state government.
Take Illinois, for example. The VRAD cabinets make it all work. The cabinet is about 4′ x 4′ x 18″. AT&T likes to place them in the public right-of-way, between the curb and the sidewalk, right next to a cross-connect cabinet. Illinois threw up the brakes because there were aesthetic complaints about the cabinets. In essence, AT&T spent two years getting the Illinois legislature to pass law allowing AT&T to do what it already had the legal right to do: use the right-of-way. You want to know why Chicago’s connections suck? There you go. AT&T has been furiously working to get the VRADs deployed. I’m grateful in a way. That was some good work in Illinois. AT&T couldn’t hire enough contractors to get the job of catching up done.
You can site the other nations as being out ahead of us, but understand that in most of those places, government owns the utility, and removes all roadblocks. I’m not advocating for government ownership of utilities, but I am saying that in this country, government is the roadblock.
It would be vastly cheaper to get government out of the way entirely, and allow multiple providers have at it. It would get done faster, companies could recoup their costs faster, and the people who get the service faster. Win-win-win.
Also examine the “speed” with which the regulated monopoly has historically innovated. Read up on how caller ID, call waiting, a decrease in long distance rates, and that internet thing, were all delayed quite intentionally by the original AT&T, under the “efficiency” of government regulated and enforced monopoly. Once that stranglehold was broken, voila! Innovation started ripping through the industry.
Now, the original post was on electric power, and my point was that so long as you only have one company providing the power, and they only reluctantly choose to provide wind (or solar, etc) power, then you’re going to get reluctantly provided service. Do you honestly think it would somehow not be better if another provider was allowed to set up in a locale to offer those consumers who wanted it the kind of electric power that was 100% wind, or 100% solar, or 100% non-coal, etc.?
Now, I’ll go to my recent travels to the Galapagos Islands, and specifically the little Isla Floriana, which has a mere 87 inhabitants. The entire island is powered by a solar station that fits on a plot 25′ x 25′.
http://kolehardfacts.blogspot.com/2008/04/power-plant-floriana-style-when-i.html
What it showed me was that power could be generated here at home in ways we’re not thinking of: Little mom & pop electric generation, directly in the neighborhood, where line-loss virtually disappears. More efficient, no pollution. What stops this from happening? The regulated territorial monopoly.
What caused the regulation into monopoly in the 1890s of so many modern utilities was, as Jason points out, the cost of infrastructure, and the perceived issues of access. What if one man owned the water utility and refused to supply water? Or electricity?
Leaving water alone for now, I think a strong case can be made that the regulated monopoly for power and telecommunications is outdated. You do have companies willing to extend infrastructure, in ways unfathomable in the 1890s. There is no interest in denying access to potential paying customers. If anything, more suppliers would love the opportunity to bring the access of multiple providers and give true consumer choice. If you think power is cheap when you have one choice, wait until you see it when there is actual competition for the service.
Mike Kole,
Even if we had massively decentralized eletricity generation (which I agree is a damn good idea, long overdue), wouldn’t we still need state regulation of access to the grid?
This doesn’t sound very imaginative. What if such an interest should arise? And wouldn’t you say such an interest did arise in California in summer 2001?
Now, I’ll grant you that the California electricity market wasn’t 100%, pure-as-the-driven-snow unadulterated laissez-faire unregulated, but, practically speaking, are we going to see zero regulation of electricity markets, ever?
If not, what do you recommend be done to prevent that sort of “market failure”?
Self-correction: the California electricity FUBAR started in 2000, not 2001.
Wikipedia on the California crisis, emphasis mine:
“Energy price regulation forced suppliers to ration their electricity supply rather than expand production. This scarcity created opportunities for market manipulation by energy speculators.
State lawmakers expected the price of electricity to decrease due to the resulting competition; hence they capped the price of electricity at the pre-deregulation level. Since they also saw it as imperative that the supply of electricity remain uninterrupted, utility companies were required by law to buy electricity from spot markets at uncapped prices when faced with imminent power shortages.
When the electricity demand in California rose, utilities had no financial incentive to expand production, as long term prices were capped.”
Nope. Not at all 100% pure-as-the-driven snow unadulterated laissez-faire unregulated. Indeed, here again, the regulation is the cause of the problem. Government acted just like the 2004 buyer of an Escalade or a Hummer- they thought, “fuel is cheap, lock it in now!” Prices didn’t stand pat, though, and the re-regulation boxed the producers in.
So, along with keeping government out of the energy business, my suggestion of an open playing field with as many producers as possible, is what would prevent that sort of ‘market’ failure.
Somehow, public policy makers think it’s better to have a few producers operating at near-100% capacity than it is to have serveral operators at 40% or 50%. Yet, in that moment of a crunch, having spare capacity is a blessed thing.
If you have multiple microgenerators in an area, the big utility can shut down entirely while the other generators continue to fuel the grid. They’ll have all the incentive in the world to get up to full capacity on a temporary basis.
California is the example that makes my argument, not defeats it.
BTW, I figured from the title that they finally put a windmill on the statehouse.. since 3-5 months of the year it’s the windiest place in the state. Hot air rises, right?
California, sitting in the sun as it does, should have every commercial building and as many residential buildings as possible creating their own solar power.
Just found this cool company: http://www.nanosolar.com
Would love to buy stock, but they’re privately held. Anyway, they claim they can just basically print rolls of solar cells like you would print rolls of film. You can cut it to size for any application, like cut it the size of your entire roof. They claim costs of 1/4 that of traditional panels.
If something like that panned out, and batteries continued to improve, solar could finally be huge. The fact that I had to read about it on page 40 of Farm Show news makes me wonder if this isn’t far enough along to warrant the enthusiasm yet. But the website looks cool.
T –
Your mention of batteries is on point – energy STORAGE is a huge issue with solar and wind power – because turning on an electrical device does not make the wind blow or the sun shine.
Until we can address that problem, nearly all electricity has to be generated at the time it is used – so you have to be able to generate for peak demand in real time.
That is true, Parker, but usually peak time is when the sun is beating down hardest and the A/Cs are cranking. Perfect time to drop some solar onto the grid.
Mike, AT&T is not the victim here. It isn’t that those mean local and state governments don’t want to let them bring the services in, they want those services as much as anyone. The issue is that AT&T only wants to bring those services to the rich parts of town, and the regulators want them to bring it to everyone.
So, AT&T comes along and says “We need new laws so we can give you the services you need!”. Then it gets to the state level, and the state grants them the ability to offer service to the areas where it is cheap to get to, and people are going to buy HBO and Showtime.
Look at Indiana. AT&T promised to give broadband statewide in exchange for their new laws. Still, most of the state (land wise) is still on dial-up as their only option.
For what it’s worth, I came across this post discussing the failure of the Municipal WiFi Service model.
It cites a memo that describes four main factors for the failure:
1. Differences between the shareholder goals of a public company and the public service goals of a city
2. Leadership changes at both Earthlink and the city itself
3. Limitations in the technology that were not apparent until the project took shape
4. Lower costs and better service among the competition
Yeah I remember that promise. As I said earlier, AT&T finally lived up to the DSL promise in my neighborhood.
Buzzcut, To answer you; I live in the very eastern-most part of Schererville-just off of Burr and north of 73rd, but I have a Merrillville prefix for my phone number. I often wondered if racism played into their decision to make our neighborhood so late coming on-line. I mean, most of “white” Schereville has had DSL for years. But our part that is tied into racially mixed Merrillville; one of the last on-line.
On the wind/solar front; it will take much better storage facilities before either of these are completely viable options in Indiana. I mean we seem to have the perma-cloud in here from October through March; and even the summer is a crap shoot. Some of our hottest days can be cloudy and humid as hell. However I see places like Phoenix being able to make this a fully-supporting option within the next 20 or so years. I’ll be interested to see how well the wind farm pans out. If it even cuts our reliance on fossil fuels by 10% it would be worth it.
It looks like companies like nanosolar want to first concentrate on municipal-level power generation. They talk about a ten acre complex powering a thousand homes. Keeping it local lowers transmission losses and you don’t have to have substations to increase the power for transmission and then step down at the other end.
By lucky happenstance, it seems that areas that don’t have as much sun do have more wind.
Storage is a challenge, but many European communities are going online with this stuff now, and seem to have it figured out. I can imagine fuel cells might end up being part of the storage equation eventually.
Maybe a few huge solar arrays in the deserts, wind farms in the Dakotas, tidal power on the coasts could provide the large-scale production for those regions, and solar on our roofs could contribute to reducing the overall need from the grid.
It would be nice to get a glimpse of how we’ll be doing this in ten years, and then just do it now.
There are plenty of reasons that your SD might be wired later than the rest of S’ville. DSL is a strange beast. I had a DSL connection in one house that was marginal because we were so far from the head end. It was DSL, but the speed was like 110 kbps on a good day (twice as fast as dialup). Luckily, my wife does mostly e-mail, and she couldn’t tell the difference (I ditched a good cable connection to get DSL).
Well, the Chicago area has like 300 days of sun on average, or something. I love those cold winter days that have full sun. PV panels are actually very temperature sensitive. Hotter temps cause them to make less power. So those clear, hot, sunny Phoenix days actually produce less power than a cold, sunny, clear day in Chicago.
In fact, when the temp goes below zero, PV panels can produce 20 to 30% more power than they’re rated for.
The real advantage that Phoenix has is that they don’t have to have heating systems. A/C is orders of magnitude more efficient than central heating. Throw some PV panels on the roof, and your a/c is essentially free, especially if you combine it with a ground loop on the condenser.
New homes down there use the new reflective insulation that takes something like 97% of the sun’s radiation and reflects it right back into space. Works really great in hot, sunny climates.
The only downside to Phoenix is the water situation. Nothing that a pipeline from Lake Michigan down there can’t fix!
Check out that blog I referenced previously (knowledge problem). One idea that gets a lot of airing on that blog is the need for smart electric meters and real time pricing of power. That would do more to spur conservation than anything.
Actually Phoenix does need to have heating systems. Just they only use them in the morning and in the evening from November until February. But they don’t nmeed the monsters we have!
Jason- You are absolutely wrong about AT&T starting by bringing the fiber service into the “rich part of town”.
Telephone services are made available in a “DA” or Distribution Area. AT&T called the project for fiber “FTTN”. The FTTN first-round builds were done in DAs with 400 or more living units in them. This was wholly irrespective of the relative wealth of a community.
I brought up the subject once with an AT&T marketer. He refuted the notion altogther, as their research showed that in fact it was the poorer neighborhoods that had both higher rates of subscription than wealthier neighborhoods, AND higher density of living units within a DA. Thus, the decision was made. It is a no-brainer business decision to go into the poorest, most densely populated areas first.
I can verify this, as the majority of my site verification work in Central Illinois was in the dodgier parts of Danville and Decatur. I’m about to go to East St. Louis to work on more of the same.
Back to Indiana- the reason most of the state is still on dial-up? Most of the DAs in AT&T’s Indiana service areas have less than 400 living units within them. Also, not all of the state is within AT&T service, so you can’t hold AT&T up as slacking in those areas. In fact, far less than 50% of the state’s land mass is served by AT&T.
It frustrates me too. I live in a DA with less than 400 living units, while the next section of the development has more than 400 units, thanks to an apartment complex there. I’d love to have high speed from AT&T since they butter my bread, but I make due with Comcast for the time being.
But believe me, FTTN was delayed for years because of state and local governments, and while their misplaced concern about which side of town was being served first was a big part of it, hardware aesthetics was another. (The cynic in me says that they wanted campaign contributions, which AT&T’s PAC did oblige.) If they had been out of the way, AT&T would probably be hitting the DAs with 250-400 living units already. Now its’ probably 1-2 years out.
Offhand, I’d agree that density is a very important consideration. That’s why rural anywhere gets most of this either last, or never.
The exception of the rule being when rural areas get complete technological upgrades. When I lived in La Porte 12 years ago, and first moved there, Union Mills was using 1930’s technology. I mean you’d call and halfway expect an operator to answer. The lines were constantly down. You’d dial a number and hear a series of clicks and then the dial tone was the old time “theeeeet…..theeeet.” A few years later they got a phone upgrade by Verizon. At the same time they became the first community in La Porte county to have DSL.
I’m in the teeny tiny little town of North Judson in Starke Co., and have 10Meg DSL with Embarq in my house. Despite hearing lots of negatives about Embarq, I find their support quite good.
Works great for Netflix’s VOD service.
Mike Kole,
Well, okay, I was afraid you’d just blame everything on price controls, and sure enough, you did.
…and you didn’t address the grid access point at all, as far as I can tell.
I guess I’ll have to spell it out even more clearly.
1) California’s electricity market was not completely unregulated.
2) What we end up with if the state implements your ideas won’t be, either. (Either because you’re not fully Rothbardian on this issue yourself, or because some lobby somewhere keeps something in place.)
3) The California electricity crisis was the result of market manipulation stimulated by consumer-level price controls and the requirement that the local utilities buy power from spot markets at whatever price was being offered.
4) That the remaining regulations under your plan won’t be the same as California’s doesn’t necessarily mean there won’t be any opportunities for market manipulation under them.
5) For us to conclude that market manipulation is highly improbable, and/or greatly limited in impact or scope, and/or swiftly remediable through state, consumer, or competitive action under your scenario, we need to know what regulations would continue to be in place, and be shown some concrete, well-thought-out examples of self-correction.
Crowing about how California is yet another defeat for those god damned socialists is not, in any way, a substitute for 5).
For everyone else, this is why Libertarians never get anywhere, and apparently why I never seem to get anywhere with them. Free market fundamentalists are like a gambler at a roulette wheel. They keep arguing, and betting, on 100% pure-as-the-driven snow unregulated laissez-faire capitalism as the answer to our problems. But if the roulette wheel doesn’t land on their number, people are fucked.
I assert that an economic system that is more robust against imperfect implementations is what we need. I invited Mike Kole to illustrate how his proposal is superior to previous attempts at deregulation. Instead of anger with the poor implementation of California’s electricity deregulation, all we got was more triumphalism, strangely predicated on a successful deregulation scenario that hasn’t yet been implemented.
I expect something better than magical thinking from political movements who claim to be superior to the major-party alternatives.
Let me close by sharing a useful razor for slicing ideology. I found it on Digby’s blog a couple of years ago. She said:
…and has spent many blog posts illustrating this point in practice.
Similarly, I predict that until Libertarians can acknowledge the concept of a market failure that isn’t somehow the fault of the State, and offer something more sophisticated and compelling in economics than the conservatives have already been pitching, they will fail to reach the broader audience they covet.
Branden- Maybe you have found the perfect snare for me, because you invite me to offer my solution with the ready-made epithet: “it hasn’t been implemented yet”. Well, true deregulation hasn’t been a feature of any living person’s lifetime, so what else could it be?
Got me, Branden! Superior you! Huzzah!
Mike Kole,
You wrote:
I’m asking you to stop thinking as if you had what Harry Browne aptly identified as the “Dictator Syndrome”. (Yes, that’s right, I’ve read a book or two of Browne’s. One of Bergland’s, too.)
That is, policy prescriptions that can only be truly judged on their merits if one can, like Zeus, throw a lightning bolt and re-order the world, are not useful, for the very reason their advocates identify–they can’t be truly judged.
Free market advocates rightly call for trepidation when government power screeches for sudden and massive interference in the economy. “What of the unintended consequences?”, they counsel.
What I’m still not hearing from you, and from the LP generally, is why shock deregulation shouldn’t be subject to the same caveats and scrutiny. “Because deregulation is good!” is an answer that preaches only to the converted. Social welfare programs in the United States, Canada, and western Europe, also achieve their ends as a first-order consequence. “But social welfare programs are bad!”, again, is a critique that only gets a lot of mileage with people who already believe that.
I suggest cutting the Gordian Knot. To hell with whether deregulation is “true” or not. The people the LP is trying to reach don’t give two shits about that sort ideological purity. Tell them how their lives will improve, in concrete ways. More importantly, acknowledge the risks. Illustrate how California is an object lesson, not in how deregulation failed a purity test, but in how its disruptive consequences were met with insufficient vigilance, and which aspects of your proposal have taken lessons away from that experience.
Since you’re a Libertarian, let me offer you a policy example where we’re probably on the same side. President Bush and the bipartisan Congress have continued to dump increasing amounts of money and personnel into the Iraq War as the situation there has continued to deteriorate. We know that doubling down on a bad hand is not a rational way to play the percentages.
I acknowledge that I can’t stop you from thinking I’m asking for too much.