> WTF? Trump Admin kills plan to upgrade decaying U.S. electrical grid

Tom Leykis wrote:

If the criminal gang known as the Biden Administration was involved, it is corrupt to the core.   Arrest all participants.

bag harder!!

We need a superconducting 10 degee K busbar running across the nation.

wrote:

Have ANY nations hardened their grid for the next Carrington event?

Is it black tie or casual?

A vote for land owners and states rights.

Fuqing faggers cannot comprehend.

The only people that want more electrical grid are AI fraudsters.

Tom Leykis wrote:

If the criminal gang known as the Biden Administration was involved, it is corrupt to the core.   Arrest all participants.

Of course - there are a lot of people making lots of money off the fact that the US power grid is a ramshackle pile of shyt that's only barely fit for purpose because the bulk energy market is priced on margin and forcing people to go to really high cost generators because there isn't enough transmission capacity to get the power from elsewhere means all the generators and traders make more money.

The customers? Yeah, they get fuqed, but as long as the insiders are making money they don't give a fuq about that.

wrote:

A vote for land owners and states rights.

Fuqing faggers cannot comprehend.

The only people that want more electrical grid are AI fraudsters.

You retard.  What happens when the grid is no longer able to keep up with supply?


HEE HAW!!Then civilization collapses and I can go robbing and raping dose uppity liberals!  HEE HAW!!!
\

wrote:

Both parties have been talking about "fixing our crumbling infrastructure" since I was old enough to know what that meant.

Both parties have done fuq all (though our freight rail system and internet system seem to be pretty good imo)

That's because actually fixing it would involve admitting that "letting the markets decide" is not always the best option when it comes to critical infrastructure. The basic issue is that market based systems tend to optimize for the greatest returns and not the greatest total utility because sometimes these objectives are in opposition.

Electricity generation is an excellent example of this - the costs of insufficient capacity are largely borne by the customers while the costs of excess capacity (mostly in the form of idle equipment and reduced ability to game the markets) are borne by the people inside the market. So the rational thing to do if you want maximum return is to run everything right on the edge of falling over, which is precisely what's happened.

wrote:

A vote for land owners and states rights.

Fuqing faggers cannot comprehend.

The only people that want more electrical grid are AI fraudsters.

Turn off your AC then.

Assclown Mini Tacos wrote:

The thing is that a stable, low cost and efficient power generation and distribution system is clearly a public good - but it's one that the benefits of are extremely diffuse and hence there is little political capital to be gained from it.

On the other hand you have people that do things like operate peaking plants or sell standby generators - and the advantages to them of a system that is flaky are direct and immediate and hence they have objectively valid reasons for agitating against grid improvements.  Since we have a political system that requires candidates to raise a lot of money in order to be successful things are always skewed towards the people that have a more focused interest.

Well said.

laughhard.gif DataLaughing.gif laughhard.gif

wrote:

For nearly a century regulated monopoly electric utilities provided Americans with cheap reliable electric power while generating a steady3-4% annual return for shareholders… but that wasn’t enough for the parasite financial class.  They paid sellout piece of shyt Republicans cocksuckers like Pete Wilson into lying the public into deregulation schemes that led to the decaying third world quality grid the worlds highest energy prices that we suffer from today.

And control and ownership and responsibility of the various layers and players is so fuqing opaque and cumbersome that it has become literally unfixable.

Although I'm not going to disagree with you that deregulation has been overall highly negative for end-users there is also another big factor at work, which is that the US power grid was never intended to be used for bulk power transfer. It grew out of a bunch of ad-hoc capacity sharing arrangements between individual generators and even today the basic principle is that each power pool should be overall balanced in it's capacity and overall consumption.

Since it was assembled over time from smaller components there is an ugly patchwork of differing technical standards so if you were to try and do something like send power from the west coast to the east coast it would end up taking an extremely inefficient route with lots of conversion losses because of the need to repeatedly change the voltage to match the transmission infrastructure.

There is also the deal with renewables - they typically have the lowest marginal cost of production but they are not schedulable and the places with the highest generation are often distant from the places that have the most load so to make the best use of them you need a combination of efficient bulk power transmission and generators that can very rapidly ramp their output in either direction to match current load.

This combination is the opposite of the one that the US grid was designed to deal with and since the incumbents make lots of their money from trading (often more than they do from generation) they have no incentive to fix it. This is another example of the conflict between maximizing returns and maximizing total utility.