No surprise there: blackout took 7 refineries offline for a few days, there was a big pipeline rupture in Arizona, it’s coming up on Labor Day weekend … Here are some links to articles discussing the gas price spike, from the Los Angeles Times (registration required), CNN/Money, and the Associated Press. I agree with Stephen … More Gas Prices Jump … More Gas Prices Jump
The blackout has raised public interest in distributed generation (DG). DG technologies have gotten more cost effective over the past decade, and many businesses that cannot afford power outages use DG for backup. See, for example, this Time article on net metering, which is allowing your meter to run backwards and thus sell power back … More Getting By Without The Grid … More Getting By Without The Grid
Paul Phlip at Long Harvest notes an oped in the NYT on the electric grid by Steve Stogratz. Stogratz makes some really important points in his argument, including the fact that we should think about the grid in a more organic and less mechanistic way, and that we should abandon the unrealistic idea about total … More The Organic Network Is Robust And Adaptive … More The Organic Network Is Robust And Adaptive
Here’s an article from today’s Tribune on wind power in Illinois. Wind power is too intermittent to be totally reliable in the absence of a better storage technology than we currently possess, but it may take strain off of the grid (especially if it’s a hot, late afternoon wind …). Wind power also receives government … More Wind Power In Illinois … More Wind Power In Illinois