27 Aug It’s A Question Of Power
by Jay Winer
We’ve all seen our legislators attempting to appear concerned by calling in BGE to explain how it reacted to our last big storm and all the outages we all suffered through. Maybe if the Public Service Commission turned down BGE for passing along the cost of power restoration from our big storms, there would be a financial incentive to bury wires. Fewer wires to come down would mean fewer outages.
BGE claims the cost of burying wires is $3Million per mile. There’s got to be a better way to deal with the problem of constant and prolonged storm outages, until a new Edison can invent a better way to distribute electricity. Smart meters: Really? BGE has a plan, the cost of which will be passed on to customers to install digital meters that can be read remotely. What if there’s no power to the meter? Hello? What’s smart about staffing and paying for tree cutting that amounts to nothing when our newest storm “Derecho” is added to our annual hurricane visits? What’s smart about any of this?
Communication and electricity via poles and wires has been around since around 1840. How far have we come in every other aspect of technology? We can bury fiber optic cable for phone and internet all over the place, but not power. All our new “cyber” age technology will not work without a reliable power source.
Where did the Trillions in “stimulus” funding go? Did we really see much improvement to outdated roads and bridges? We can get to those when we change over to more manufacturing to create more jobs. What about a national program to update the power grid and make it safe- really safe. Talk about new jobs!
Oh, and let’s not forget to add up the cost of the lost business, work time and other economic loss, including taxes to our beloved State from all this loss activity. Well, I guess there’s always higher sales taxes from customers having to re-stock refrigerators at least once and from all that extra diesel fuel for generators.
Is this all solvable and even affordable? I’m not smart enough to know how to fix each element, but something tells me, yes!