Worth noting that your link says a big chunk of the electricity increase is due to wildfires, which CA utilities apparently bear most of the responsibility for preventing. I think we are now seeing the first economic casualties of global warming in the USA. Arizona is pausing development because of a lack of water and CA has rising energy costs and uninsurable homes because of wildfires. I suspect the next regions to be hit will be the midwest where rising wet bulb temperatures will make working outside during much of the summer virtually impossible while also increasing the heat deaths of livestock. Thatās a big double whammy for a region so dependent on agriculture. It is already beginning.
May soon not be all that unusual. Should these factors be considered part of the cost of using fossil fuels?
Anyone who has studied large complex systems in the abstract and in realities such as ecologies (as I have), or electrical grids with automatic triggering systems, or even ships such as the Titanic will tell you
Failures Will Be HUGE, UNPREDICTABLE, and DEATHLY COSTLY
The years ahead will be full of such headlines as āCattle Dieā, āCity Goneā, āMassive Refugee Migration Trappedā
Just seemed to be time to remind everyone again that GCC could have been prevented, but with so much money on the line and profits huge for the mine and well owners, sane scientific conversations and warnings were trampled.
david fb
(yes, Iāve told you so for the past 25 years)
The rapid increase in heat in a few days was the likely cause.
Also, they estimated about 10,000 head died.
Kansas livestock count: Cattle, Cows, Beef - Inventory ( First of Jan. 2023 ) 1,315,000
10,000 deaths are pretty insignificant when compared to 1.3 million.
And finally, feedlots are a lot hotter than a pasture. Riding past a pasture of alfalfa, corn or soybeans is 15 to 20 degrees cooler than riding past a harvested field of wheat or freshly plowed soil. Cattle in feedlots is not optimal, though it must be profitable since they are all over the state. Issues related to cattle feedlots include123:
Muddy conditions, heat stress, and animal handling are the three major welfare concerns for outdoor feedlot cattle.
Additional animal, resource, and management factors may also affect cattle welfare.
Major emergency diseases of concern to the beef cattle feedlot industry include foot and mouth disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), contagious bovine pleuro-pneumonia, lumpy skin disease, Jembrana disease, rinderpest, anthrax, brucella abortus, screw worm fly, surra, and vesicular stomatitis.
Cattle stand in small, crowded areas in their own poo(TMF censor) and urine all the time, which is a disadvantage of feedlots.
Cattle that are fed a high corn-based diet can have increased amounts of E.coli in their digestive tract, which is another disadvantage of feedlots.
The meter tells you usage it does not tell you want your grid connect fee is, if any.
Right now a typical residential customer probably pays nothing for grid connection.
I have solar and I pay about $10/month for grid connect (slightly varies based on number of days in the billing cycle). You donāt see this on the meter.
Technically this fee is a minimum monthly charge, so if I suddenly used much more than I generate I would just be paying for that extra $10+ kwh and nothing for grid connect. This actually gets settled once a year on my true up bill.
A large customer, such as the many schools and offices in my area have several hundred panels. A $10 fee per month would be nothing to them, while it is a relatively big percentage of my bill before I got solar (many months I was below $50)
But, what would it measure? We know without measurement that it is connected. The issue is what to charge for it that is fair across the customer base. This has nothing to do with usage.
They pay, but it is not a broken-out figure from the electric company.
Simplest is to have a 2-part system:
Part 1 is a monopoly (could be the govtāor not) and handles all the hardware up to the customer locationābut the company does not supply electricity. They have a uniform network cost billed to each customer based on the type of service (and expected usage) installed. This is the power distribution network. There is a small distribution fee based on volumeāwhich should be included in the base network distribution cost. Different fee structure for small, medium, and large users, but that is more related to the time and cost needed to properly deliver the power needs of each customer.
Electricity suppliers use the distribution network to sell electricity to each customer. Users choose the electricity supplier of their choiceāat the price set by (or negotiated with) the supplier.
This system works because the hardware (distribution network) is needed by virtually everyone, so it is a āuniversalā service in the same sense as fire/police/EMT and so on. Treating it the same way (as a public service) in terms of the āsystemā is reasonable and rational.
Thatās also possible via government transfers. For example, an area that wants to do this could allocate a portion of their sales taxes to be transferred to their electric utility for base expenses.
No, because someone connected to the grid can count on electricity being available when their own system is not adequate. Think of the case of someone with a huge solar array, but no batteries. They may generate so much electricity during the day to be net zero overall, but without the grid connection the place would be dark at night.
