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April 18, 2006
KHOU invents power crises
Shame on KHOU Houston, the local CBS affiliate for their attempts to create power crises. Their report this morning was filled with highly charged words such as, “rolling blackouts.” In a day and age when citizens are more misguidedly obsessed with kilowatt hours and price per gallon, (instead of rising bank service fees) KHOU is capitalizing on public fear and buzzwords. The state that most of us equate rolling blackouts with is California. There exists no greater and example of polar opposites in energy policy than Texas and California.
California has rolling blackouts due to a variety of situations.
For starters they do not produce enough electricity to meet their needs. One would think that building new capacity would be a wise choice, but the state of California makes it extremely hard to do so. Simply put California exports pollution. Their growing demand for electricity increases pollution in the states they import it from. This is fine with Californians as long as their state is protected.
California has an aging power grid that has not received the maintenance and expansion that is needed to provide reliable power transmission. Environmental, NIMBY, and BANANA factors have played a big time role in this situation.
(BANANA = Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone)
Texas on the other hand is completely self sustaining.
We meet our electrical needs and then some.
We build new power plants when growth warrants them.
We are not afraid of Nuclear Energy and seek diversified sources of power generation.
Texas is a major producer of eco-friendly wind power and will overtake California in wind turbine numbers if the pro-bird, anti-wind activists have their way.
The Texas grid supplies Texas. We do not increase pollution in other states by relying on their generation facilities.
Given the overall reliability of the Texas power grid one should not be alarmed at power outages caused by normal maintenance and peak season preparation.
Chalk this up as another slow news day story.
Posted by downtownadmin at 10:09 AM | Comments (0)