More power to make power (NV schools)

[jpak]

http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/sun/2006/aug/28/566613091.html

Southern Nevada may be blessed with an abundance of potential clean, renewable energy sources, but one big user of energy has had a tough time putting the sun and wind to work.

The Clark County School District, like other potential energy generators, has been effectively thwarted from building large systems to produce the power it needs at its hundreds of schools. The problem is state law, which puts a limit of 150 kilowatts that a school, business or even a resident can generate.

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Now, the School Board and Gov. Kenny Guinn's Renewable Energy Task Force are working to increase the state limit to 2 megawatts - 2 million watts of power. Producing that much power would not only light up a school, but also could put clean energy onto the regional energy grid.

<snip>

Rose McKinney-James, School District lobbyist and a member of the task force, says the time has come to raise the state-mandated limit. She says the limitation resulted from trepidation of Sierra Pacific Resources and its subsidiary, Nevada Power.

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[JohnWxy]

1. Another example of people doing in a small way what could be done

at the Federal level in a big way. The GOP prefers the Katrina-FEMA model of dealing with problems. Ignore the problem until your up to your eye-balls in shit. And then fuck-up the process all the more with astounding incompetence (followed by endless finger pointing: "Well THEY didn't fill out the form right. IT ain't MY fault. HE was supposed to tell me what to do.")


Wind power works, makes economic (in addition to environmental) sense so people are just going ahead with it themselves. INtegration of independent power producers into the energy grid could really be helped along with federal involvement in standardizing the applicable rules.

Of course, more impetus for wind power expansion from the federal government would be nice too. But let's be realistic, this administration is owned by the extractive resources industries (well, along with big-Pharma). The only wind power they're interested in is what comes out of their owned politicians asses during campaign season.

We need a national commitment to these winning (i.e. not only GHG reducing but economically valid) technologies (wind and other proven, renewables) not unlike the national initiative to put a man on the moon. In additon to GHG reduction, Wind is the cheapest source of power we have today. The main thing holding back wind turbine installations today is the production capacity of wind turbine manufacurers can't keep up with the demand. (By the way, MR. Bush, as U.S. manufacturers of wind turbines expand their production capacity they will be able to compete more effectively for orders for wind turbines which will be coming in from China and all over the world in the coming years. Facilitating our manufacturers expansion would make sense for this country in terms of world trade. Or is this coming too fast for ya'?) What Boeing was to the Aircraft industry, GE (and perhaps others) could be to the coming wind power industry.

[bananas]

2. They're talking about wind, not solar?

The first thought that comes to mind for Nevada would be solar.

[mccoyn]

3. It's time for that law to go.

I would think it should be written that any building can produce power up to 125% of its usage. Afterall, the building already is wired to handle that much so you aren't introducing any new safty issues. Of course, the law wasn't written with safty issues in mind.