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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Snowshoe who wrote (255199)	6/21/2008 1:50:55 PM
From: Glenn Petersen	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 793803

While electricity may be cheaper, we are do not have much excess capacity: Right now the nation has 760 gigawatts of power plants to meet current consumption, with another 154 in reserve capacity to maintain grid reliability. But in fact only 10 gigs is truly excess capacity. The other 144 is utterly essential to keep lights on when unexpected demand arises from heat waves, outages or maintenance downtime. That reserve will begin to shrink quickly. NERC estimates that over the next decade 135 gigawatts of new capacity will be needed to meet the growth in consumption. But right now plants producing a total of 57 gigawatts are planned… While oil gets the attention, America uses just 15% more of it today than when the first modern energy crisis hit in October 1973. But electricity use is up 115% since then, thanks to all those plasma screens, iPhones, computers and data centers. And all economic forecasts see substantial growth in demand for electricity--think just of the coming electric cars--yet lots of problems in meeting it. Message 24690821