The Roanoke Slant

Roanoke Times, 10-28-09, Pg 20: Editorial: Obama to spend $3.4 BILLION to upgrade the national power grid with money from the stimulus package.
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The money comes from the stimulus package?
HELLO!!! THE MONEY COMES FROM THE TAXPAYERS!
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Apparently the new energy policy is to use a “smart Grid” to be invented by Virginia Tech to ensure energy supplies when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. “Editor: A smart grid can compensate for that”
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Good choice VT! Should work in well with the VT Smart Road project!
A better start would be for Virginia Tech. to do a comprehensive Energy Change Assessment outlined in:
http://roanokeslant.blogspot.com/2009/04/vt-energy-assessment-challenge.html
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The national electric grid (already quite smart) is sets of wires and switches connected to electric sources as inputs and to electric users as outputs. The amount of power moved each day is beyond the comprehension of most people (like the $2 TRILLION debt that Obama-Pelosi-Reid just committed us to).
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The Obama/Gore plan is to eliminate all fossil-fuel generators and replace them with wind and solar systems that are very expensive and are intermittent supply systems
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This conversion will probably take a lifetime based on the Virginia Highlands wind project that has been in the Virginia bureaucratic swamp for 5 years and is now still on hold because it is visible from a West Va. civil war cemetery.
http://roanokeslant.blogspot.com/2009/03/no-new-energy-jihad_23.html
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The key to system design of intermittent supply systems is storage. This is similar to squirrels storing nuts or computers utilizing cache memory or a car battery.
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The Smith Mountain Dam System is perhaps the only example in Virginia of a utility-size energy storage system. It has very limited capacity and is used only for limited “peak power” grid demand that is integrated into the current electric grid.
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Most of the peak-power systems in the country are jet-engines (modified aircraft jet engines) that burn natural gas and are located within cities. NYC has hundreds of these facilities sited on vacant lots and in abandoned commercial buildings. These are switched into and out of the grid as required.
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So when one says glibly: “A smart grid can compensate for that”; one must ask where and what are the energy storage systems that can carry the absence of sun-power for 18 hours a day ( 4 PM to 10 AM )?
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The cost to the taxpayers and electric customers for this energy substitution will be incalculable and the reasons driving these changes are hypothesis and not facts.
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Energy independence is our crisis and the truly “green” solution for utility power is nuclear not wind or sun.
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Prior Items:
http://www.roanokeslant.org/GlobalWarmingThoughts/
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http://roanokeslant.blogspot.com/2009/07/virginia-below-national-average-cost-of.html
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http://roanokeslant.blogspot.com/2009/05/for-climate-change-fashion-go-white.html
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