one last whine- editorial on Egypt/ Utilities(don'ask...)

[w8liftinglady]

in,of course, my paper...

http://www.thedailylight.com/articles/2011/02/06/opinion/doc4d4e47a0c59d4297900770.txt

In search of utility
Paul Perry

This column is about what used to be call public utilities. Both near and far. First the near. It appears the company that generates the most power in Texas – we used to call it TXU – was ill prepared for the recent bout of chilly but mostly non-record cold weather. The power-generation company responsible now has another name. But in honor of Wyle E. Coyote, we will refer to it as ACME.

For those of you who have recently moved in from Islamorada, Fla, or were born in the comparatively balmy 1990s, it has been colder in North Texas before. Oh, don’t get me wrong; it has been plenty cold lately. Our well-wrapped outdoor faucet actually froze on Thursday morning. My wife had to thaw it with a hair dryer. The chickens had to be fed and watered. I, of course, was busy writing this column.

Anyway, it has actually been below zero here before in North Texas. In my lifetime. Most of us who have lived in North Texas since, say, 1980 or so remember colder winters. We learned to drive large multi-ton 8-mile-per-gallon sedans through ice and snow for a few years. Those were my salad days. Many of us actually owned snow chains.

Every now and then from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s, we would set a single-day snow record, tie an all-time low temperature record, or even set the record for most days below freezing. In December 1983 (a record 294 hours below freezing) and again in 1989 (record low -2 F), Waxahachie gardeners reported that even crape myrtles died. City fathers and mothers wept. During the ’70s and ’80s, we had so many ice storms no one needed to trim trees after the first few storms broke the most brittle limbs. There were only minor threats to the state power grid. There were local and significant outages from fallen limbs, etc., but no general threat to the grid.

Those of us who function beyond a third-grade level wonder how power generation capacity for the entire state could be threatened by the failure of a couple of coal generation plants.

How is it that at least two of DFW’s primary care hospitals had to endure ACME – or was it sister company AAA – planned rolling blackouts? Personally, I want to see something medieval done in the name of justice to whatever individual – more like committee – no, more like multiple committees – who are responsible. I want them all fired and publicly humiliated in all the major papers. And you, dear reader, thought I wanted their heads on pikes.

Seriously, two power plants are mis-engineered, and we nearly shut down Texas?! Mexico, God Bless her, has sent us foreign aid in the form of electricity and, even worse, we took help from – gulp – Louisiana!? I may bury my Justin boots and my Stetson in shame.

Texas has more people trained in energy management and production than any other state. We have newfound and extensive natural gas resources and probably hundreds of years worth of coal, no telling how much uranium, and those infernal ugly windmill bird swatter things from Big Bend to the Coastal Bend, and we don’t have electricity during a serious but normal range cold snap?

This, my fellow Texans, is embarrassing.

My solution: more generation capacity. Quit whining over coal plants, build them, ditto nuclear, natural gas, etc. Stuff the windmills; they are by far the least efficient and certainly the ugliest. One or two might work great for your homestead, but industrially I do not want to depend on the vagaries of the weather and wind, even in Texas – make that especially in Texas.

Now a little bit about the far utilities – after all, the Internet is a utility, so are cell phones even in faraway Egypt. In response to what was a civil call for a change in government in pseudo-ally Egypt, the government opted to cut off Internet and cell phone use. In effect, they killed those communications. Did you notice how the demonstrations then became more and more violent?

Let me think. People are upset at their government, so they peacefully assemble in protest and government officials in the utter looney logic of governments everywhere think the thing to do is shut people off from talking to each other. In Egypt, a known torture and rendition destination, things have gone from bad to worse, go figure.

But we have the Super Bowl and the First Amendment and no one can shut Americans’ communications down, right? Why, it just goes to figure that those Third Worlders in Egypt would do something like that – kill the Internet (such primitives). Why, even Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton rushed to proclaim such communications as a human right.

Back in the constitutionally protected United States in the shadowy halls of Washington D.C., Senator Joseph Isadore Lieberman, a non-Egyptian and Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, continued to work for an Internet kill switch, a bill being backed by the administration. Such power is all the rage in Third World Egypt and even coveted by President Barack Hussein Obama. So much for the Constitution.

Which public utility should we care most about, near or far?

Paul D. Perry is a contributing columnist for the Daily Light. He is a local businessman and mediator and a former Ellis County Justice of the Peace.