Sorry about that 14.5% price spike
Oregon is investing in renewable energy and it's ratepayers are feeling the pain.
From
The Oregonian:
Rates set to jump for Pacific Power, PGE customers in January.
Come New Year's, better strip the lights off the house and the Christmas tree ASAP.
Customers of Pacific Power will see their electric rates spike 14.5 percent in January. The increase comes in a one-two punch: an 8.4 percent general rate increase state utility regulators approved Friday, and a 6.1 percent increase for increased power costs they are expected to approve Dec. 28. Both take effect Jan. 1.
Meanwhile, customers of the state's largest electric utility, Portland General Electric Co., will see a lesser, but still significant, rate increase of about 3.9 percent. A few mandatory cost adjustments in the works will bump that overall increase to 4.2 percent, effective Jan. 1.
The biggest factor driving the increases: renewable power.
Hat tip to
Anthony for the link.
Oregon gets 26.6% of its energy from hydro and 1.8% from wind.
They import 30.2%.
No nukes. Pity as nukes are cheap in the long run...
Lots of interesting comments to the post. This one from Bob Horning speaks volumes:
You can thank the extreme environmentalists for this one, and the ones to follow. And to top it off all of this expensive wind power is as dirty as anything else. For every KW of wind power you have to have a KW of another reliable source of power ready for when the wind dies. That power is gas or coal, and the dirty secret is that they have to run at a hot idle to be ready to go at a moments notice, not producing power, just burning energy to stay hot.
Wind power and the rest of the renewables is a joke, it's only competitive because of the tax credits, YOUR TAX dollars supplementing it. So you are not only paying your power bill in the mail, you are also paying your power bill through your taxes, a hidden bill.
America was built with cheap power, we can still have it, but the eviro wackos will not go for nuclear (which now through fast reactors have a half life of only 400 years instead of thousands) and are trying to stop natural gas and coal power even though they have scrubbers.
So next time you pay your bill, just remember you have an extremist to thank for it. And please, don't tell me that I need to thank them for a clean environment, We're all for a good environment, they carry it way too far, to a point that it's not helping but hurting. After all, a clean environment costs money, and if we're broke, who's going to pay for it? Broke countries around the world are some of the most polluted.
What he said...
Posted by DaveH at December 19, 2010 12:20 PM