28th November 2016, 6:52 AM
Get renewables up and provide competition in areas and prices on electricity WILL go down. In case you couldn't tell, that's exactly the solution I want. Oklahoma is ripe for renewable wind turbine energy. Maine, being next to the coast, may be ripe for tidal energy nacelles like they recently started rolling out in Scotland (That's right, you could tell people you are powered by the moon!). Unfortunately, we're also a major oil state, so wind has had a hard time getting a start out here. That's not to say we've got NO renewables here. There's at least a few small companies selling it here and there around the state, but it's small time compared to good ol' fashioned dino blood.
I really don't think our electricity is cheaper (we're in the same situation as a lot of places, where one electric company is basically the only game in town so they get full control of the prices on their own terms), but our heating needs are certainly a lot less than your's. During the transition from fall to winter, we turn off both the A/C and heating (I should point out that yep, central air does still need something to heat it, and that something is an electric heater, usually located right next to the internal part of the A/C), and just leave it all off until it actually gets cold enough that we really need the heater on. I do know some family and friends who love it hot, so they'll turn the heater on sooner than I will, but generally that's how it goes. Winter is when we save money on our electric bills. That said, summer is what kills us. Usually, I can look forward to drastically higher electric bills for about 3 months in the year. This year I've had about 6 months due to an unusually long summer (and yes, I define the seasons not as exactly cutting it up into specific "start" and "end" dates but rather the meteorological way of defining it by the weather, which is less precise but is actually USEFUL (what's the point of defining exact start and end dates if in the end you get seasons that don't actually tell you anything at all, in which case you might as well not even have seasons). Another factor might be that our houses are generally newer than the ones on the east coast, due to our having been "settled" much more recently. Due to that, our houses are built to more recent building code standards than your's. For example, I'm aware that most places in New York and so on still have those dangerous plastic dryer vent tubes, whereas in Oklahoma they're almost all metal. I myself am living in a very recently built place that's even got ethernet cabling in the walls already, and it holds in the temp pretty well. Not all our places are so lucky, but that might have a lot to do with things. That said, Oklahoma's building codes are still different, so then we go back to our general lack of basements or storm shelters around here, and, more recently, the lack of any structural reinforcement for earthquakes.
And we've come full circle. If your state has to pay for a slow rollout of electric heating down the line, I say that's the price I'M willing to pay to make Oklahoma stop shaking. You must understand the two are not equal. If it is any consolation, coal burning stoves and oil burning heaters aren't the greatest generators of greenhouse gasses anyway. That still goes to industry. They're the champs generating the lion's share of carbon, to the point that even if we switched all our cars to electric tomorrow, it would only put a small dent in total emissions. If industry isn't changed (for example, shutting down coal burning plants in favor of wind turbines and the like), we're doomed. You say that there's a cost to pay either way, but you can't equivocate like that. Sometimes, we really do need to say "this thing is absolutely worse than the other thing", and that's when these choices come up. This is a very obvious choice. Your power bill does NOT outweigh our desire to not be caught in earthquakes. This is an undeniable fact.
I really don't think our electricity is cheaper (we're in the same situation as a lot of places, where one electric company is basically the only game in town so they get full control of the prices on their own terms), but our heating needs are certainly a lot less than your's. During the transition from fall to winter, we turn off both the A/C and heating (I should point out that yep, central air does still need something to heat it, and that something is an electric heater, usually located right next to the internal part of the A/C), and just leave it all off until it actually gets cold enough that we really need the heater on. I do know some family and friends who love it hot, so they'll turn the heater on sooner than I will, but generally that's how it goes. Winter is when we save money on our electric bills. That said, summer is what kills us. Usually, I can look forward to drastically higher electric bills for about 3 months in the year. This year I've had about 6 months due to an unusually long summer (and yes, I define the seasons not as exactly cutting it up into specific "start" and "end" dates but rather the meteorological way of defining it by the weather, which is less precise but is actually USEFUL (what's the point of defining exact start and end dates if in the end you get seasons that don't actually tell you anything at all, in which case you might as well not even have seasons). Another factor might be that our houses are generally newer than the ones on the east coast, due to our having been "settled" much more recently. Due to that, our houses are built to more recent building code standards than your's. For example, I'm aware that most places in New York and so on still have those dangerous plastic dryer vent tubes, whereas in Oklahoma they're almost all metal. I myself am living in a very recently built place that's even got ethernet cabling in the walls already, and it holds in the temp pretty well. Not all our places are so lucky, but that might have a lot to do with things. That said, Oklahoma's building codes are still different, so then we go back to our general lack of basements or storm shelters around here, and, more recently, the lack of any structural reinforcement for earthquakes.
And we've come full circle. If your state has to pay for a slow rollout of electric heating down the line, I say that's the price I'M willing to pay to make Oklahoma stop shaking. You must understand the two are not equal. If it is any consolation, coal burning stoves and oil burning heaters aren't the greatest generators of greenhouse gasses anyway. That still goes to industry. They're the champs generating the lion's share of carbon, to the point that even if we switched all our cars to electric tomorrow, it would only put a small dent in total emissions. If industry isn't changed (for example, shutting down coal burning plants in favor of wind turbines and the like), we're doomed. You say that there's a cost to pay either way, but you can't equivocate like that. Sometimes, we really do need to say "this thing is absolutely worse than the other thing", and that's when these choices come up. This is a very obvious choice. Your power bill does NOT outweigh our desire to not be caught in earthquakes. This is an undeniable fact.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)