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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (228980)	4/12/2005 7:04:04 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572803

I prefer market based approaches generally. However, and this gets back to your post on oil refiners, there are problems when infrastructure costs are amortized over long periods. What we need are higher but stable energy costs. Why sink $1B into a large refinery, when the odds are that increased capacity will depress revenue? I can look out my window, and literally see such a problem. When the CA energy "crisis" made energy production look like a gold mine, some large wind farms went in here. Everyone and his uncles brother were claiming the problems in CA were a long term trend (all do to them godless environmentalists), and sure to get worse. Utility companies around here even went so far as to purchase capacity back from farmers at handsome prices (farmer puts in a disel pump on his irrigation, giving up the equivalent electric capacity which was then sold to CA). Western States Cat dealers loved it. Anyway, speculation dynamics can do that sort of thing. Higher stable prices would allow solutions. But how does one get there without regulation, which has its own set of problems? BTW, I took advantage of a state government energy tax credit to switch from a 50KVA pump to a 15KVA pump and lower pressure sprinklers in the mid 1990's. Under some conditions, it is actually cheaper for PUD's to "develop" capacity by mining potential conservation sources. I had a large overhead sprinkler system, which operated at high flow rates and high pressure, for shorter time periods. I replaced it with a low pressure system using microsprinklers (I'm now almost all drip to boot) which is more energy efficient, but does run for a greater percentage of the time. The PUD picks up not only the total energy savings of the more efficient system, but also peak capacity, since I can never consume 50KVA. I was able to write of 1/3 of the cost of this conversion directly against my state tax bill over 5 years.