Ameren Screws Illinois Homeowners – Why are they paying for Ameren’s power grid

This is absurd.

 

http://www.sj-r.com/article/20141211/NEWS/141219899/-1/json

 

$137M Ameren rate increase approved

 

By Tim Landis
Business Editor
Posted Dec. 11, 2014 @ 9:05 am
Updated at 9:23 AM

State utility regulators have approved a $137 million rate increase for power-grid upgrades on the Ameren Illinois system.

The 17.4 percent increase in electricity distribution rates, announced Wednesday by the Illinois Commerce Commission, take effect Jan. 1. Commissioners also approved a $245 million increase for system upgrades on the Commonwealth Edison system, serving Chicago and northern Illinois.

Ameren serves 1.2 million electric and 806,000 natural-gas customers in central and southern Illinois.

Commission chairman Doug Scott said in a statement the rates were set under the 2011 Energy Infrastructure Modernization Act, a state law that allowed Ameren and ComEd to recover annual costs for installation of smart grid technology such as high-tech meters, real-time pricing of electricity, more control options for consumers and more accurate energy data.

Scott said commissioners tried to balance the need for network improvements with long-term benefits to ratepayers.

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I Think Clean Energy Transmission Lines Are Splendid – But there are the classic complaints

They take to much room, they lower land values, they don’t generate enough income, they are unnecessary, and finally they are a blight on the land. I believe that Grid upgrades are require for the use of alternative energy sources and so I say “Build Baby Build”.

http://www.sj-r.com/article/20140802/News/140809877

Wind power drives demand for new transmission lines

By Tim Landis
Business Editor
Posted Aug. 2, 2014 @ 9:30 pm

A second high-voltage transmission line — this one intended for power from Kansas wind turbines — is making its way toward central Illinois.

The Grain Belt Express power line would carry electricity from wind farms in western Kansas across central Missouri and Illinois to Indiana, following the same general corridor as the Illinois Rivers power line already announced by Ameren Transmission Co. of Illinois. Illinois Rivers also would carry wind-generated power west to east.

Kansas and Indiana utility regulators have approved the $2 billion Grain Belt project, www.grainbeltexpresscleanline.com, and regulators in Missouri plan to hold public hearings this week. As with the Illinois Rivers project, the Grain Belt Express has generated controversy. Proponents argue for jobs and clean energy. Opponents fear falling land values and health hazards.

Illinois is expected to be the next regulatory stop for the 750-mile power line.

“We’re taking a state-by-state approach to our regulatory process,” said Adhar Johnson, project manager for Grain Belt Express.

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Trailers -As housing: Good or Bad

I do not propose to write a treatise on Trailer’s as abodes. I have never seen one that was energy efficient, but I am sure they exist. I have a Trailer Park in my precinct so I am familiar with them a bit. My experience with them is that if the owners care, they can be really nice and homey. On the other hand if they are occupied by renters or they are occupied by people who do not take care of them, they can be real slums. Course the same could be said for most houses.

http://ced.berkeley.edu/bpj/2013/04/how-the-other-half-lives-exploring-trailer-parks-in-the-american-sunbelt/

 

How the Other Half Lives: Exploring Trailer Parks in the American Sun Belt

Written by on April 2, 2013 in Urban Fringe3 Comments

I believe that trailer parks are an important source of affordable housing for low-income households. I also believe that they serve as an important transitional step for social mobility. These conclusions are a culmination of a complex and emotional although enriching personal journey of writing my senior thesis at UC Berkeley.

As an urban studies undergraduate, I first sought to investigate the concept of colonias because to me it represented the Third World phenomenon of informalities on First World territory. The journey began in the summer of 2012 when I received the Judith Lee Stronach Summer Travel Scholarship to explore poor migrant settlements near the U.S.-Mexico border. During my travels, I drove along the U.S.-Mexico border through the States of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas to study this phenomenon of underdevelopment. But what I saw was very different from what I expected, based on the academic papers and scholarly books I had read.

Naively, I had expected to find isolated pockets of poverty that could be addressed through institutionally coordinated efforts and proactive legislation. But what I found were not isolated settlements but whole poverty-stricken neighborhoods, suburbs and, in some cases, cities, built entirely of mobile homes and trailer parks. I had never inquired into this scattered pattern of settlement clusters before, where people seemed to be camping permanently in mobile homes over the vast expanse of desert land. Initially, residences looked empty, isolated and neglected, uprooted and restless. But after spending a few weeks in the Sun Belt, I began to question my preconceived notions about life in the desert. I became conscious of very different ways of life that exist outside American metropolises. I started to wonder whether there was not one, but multiple American Dreams.

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Some Utilities Like Solar _ As reported earlier some don’t

But it appears that the world is changing.

 

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/big-utilities-push-into-booming-home-solar-market/

 

Big Utilities Push into Booming Home Solar Market

By Nichola Groom (Reuters) – For years, the utilities responsible for providing electricity to the nation have treated residential solar systems as a threat.

By Nichola Groom

(Reuters) – For years, the utilities responsible for providing electricity to the nation have treated residential solar systems as a threat. Now, they want a piece of the action, and they are having to fight for the chance.

If utilities embrace home solar, their deep pockets and access to customers could transform what has been a fast-growing, but niche industry. Solar powers only half a million U.S. homes and businesses, according to solar market research firm GTM Research.

But utility-owned rooftop systems represent a change the solar installation companies who dominate the market don’t want, and whether the two sides can compromise may determine if residential solar truly goes mainstream.

In Arizona, the state’s largest utility has proposed putting solar panels on 3,000 customers’ homes, promising a $30 monthly break on their power bills. In New York, regulators are weighing allowing utilities to get into the solar leasing business to meet the state’s aggressive plan to incorporate more decentralized, renewable power onto the grid.

 

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Ameren To Charge To Read Meter – That is like a paperboy charging you for their bike

There is such a thing as the cost of doing business.

http://wtax.com/news/101101-ameren-threatens-20-monthly-fee-for-no-smart-meters/

Ameren Threatens $20 Monthly Fee for No Smart Meters

Ameren Illinois says customers who refuse to have an electricity meter installed will see an additional $20 monthly fee on their bills.

Ameren says the so-called smart meters, which transmit details about power usage, enable the utility to pinpoint outage problems and fix them faster. It says the meters can be read remotely and that the $20 fee covers the cost of sending out a person to read the older analog meter.

The company is set to install 780,000 of the new electricity meters in central Illinois and 468,000 upgraded gas meters, which offer similar capabilities.

The Illinois Commerce Commission, the state’s utility regulators, approved the extra charge and said the company should be compensated for meters that require a person to visit them.

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Plug Monitors Save Energy – I did not even know they existed

For someone like me that has been at this for so long, you get a little lazy about keeping up with the new stuff so this caught me off guard.

 

http://www.treehugger.com/clean-technology/the-power-monitor-top-tools-for-watching-your-home-energy-use.html

 

The Power Monitor: Top Tools for Watching Your Home Energy Use

You can reduce electricity use by 15 percent without trying. Sound too good to be true? It isn’t. For those consumers using power monitors, this these are typical reductions. Just by being aware of where and when electricity is used, you’re far more likely to off a few devices or flipping a few light switches that might have been left on before, and can make a big dent in their energy consumption. IBM just solidified this statistic with their recent smart meter pilot program, and those households who really put in the effort showed as much as a 40% reduction on energy use. When looking at ways to monitor the energy consumption in a home, power monitors fit in three big buckets: checking the consumption of single devices or appliances, monitoring the energy use of a whole house, and online dashboards that link up with utility companies as part of a smart grid. The steady advance of smart grid technologies will bring more and more user-friendly options to the table. But for now, here are the three umbrella categories, and a few of the top tools under each that are helping people shrink the amount of electricity they use.

Plug Load Power Monitors

Kill A Watt is a classic example of a plug load monitor. These are power monitors that plug into a wall outlet, and then the device is plugged into them. They monitor how much energy the device is sucking up. They’re a great way to know which devices are power sippers, and which need to be unplugged. Other examples are the Watts Up Pro, which is similar to, but bulkier than the Kill A Watt; and the Brultech ECM-1220, which can monitor not only plug-in devices but also things that are wired into the home or the plug isn’t accessible (like dishwashers or ceiling fans) thanks to a current sensor that clamps onto the cord of the device.

 

The price range is significant, from about $35 for a Kill A Watt, to about $120 for a Watts Up, to about $250 for a Brultech ECM-1120. So your investment can vary, and really depends on how involved you need your basic plug load monitor to be.

You can check out a couple of these reviewed by Jon Plowman, the former head of BBC Comedy, along with some from the next category

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Let’s Waste Some Money – We build an energy sucking house

So how would we build a house that consumed as much energy as possible? Well, first let us start with Neon Lighting. I am talking about the old fashioned Las Vegas style. The only lighting allowed in the house.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neon_lighting

Neon lighting

Neon lighting consists of brightly glowing, electrified glass tubes or bulbs that contain rarefied neon or other gases. Neon lights are a type of cold cathode gas-discharge light. A neon tube light is a sealed glass tube with a metal electrode at each end, filled with one of a number of gases at low pressure. A high potential of several thousand volts applied to the electrodes ionizes the gas in the tube, causing it to emit colored light by fluorescence. The color of the light depends on the gas in the tube. Neon lights were named for neon, a noble gas which gives off a popular red light, but other gases and chemicals are used to produce other colors, such as helium (yellow), carbon dioxide (white), and mercury (blue). Neon tubes can be fabricated in curving artistic shapes, to form letters or pictures. They are mainly used to make dramatic, multicolored glowing signage for advertising, called neon signs, which were popular from the 1920s to the 1950s.

The term can also refer to the miniature neon glow lamp, developed in 1917, about seven years after neon tube lighting.[1] While neon tube lights are typically meters long, the neon lamps can be less than one centimeter in length and glow much more dimly than the tube lights. They are still in use as small indicator lights. Through the 1970s, neon glow lamps were widely used for numerical displays in electronics, for small decorative lamps, and as signal processing devices in circuity. While these lamps are now antiques, the technology of the neon glow lamp developed into contemporary plasma displays and televisions.[2][3]

Georges Claude, a French engineer and inventor, presented neon tube lighting in essentially its modern form at the Paris Motor Show from December 3–18, 1910.[4][5][6] Claude, sometimes called “the Edison of France”,[7] had a near monopoly on the new technology, which became very popular for signage and displays in the period 1920-1940. Neon lighting was an important cultural phenomenon in the United States in that era;[8] by 1940, the downtowns of nearly every city in the US were bright with neon signage, and Times Square in New York City was known worldwide for its neon extravagances.[9][10] There were 2000 shops nationwide designing and fabricating neon signs.[11][12] The popularity, intricacy, and scale of neon signage for advertising declined in the U.S. following the Second World War (1939–1945), but development continued vigorously in Japan, Iran, and some other countries.[11] In recent decades architects and artists, in addition to sign designers, have again adopted neon tube lighting as a component in their works

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Illinois EPA Approves Utility Rate Hike – Did not know they could do that

That is right. While they really can’t raise your electricity  rates, they will in effect be raising your electricity costs. That is because Carbon Sequestration is expensive.

 

http://www.stltoday.com/business/local/epa-approves-futuregen-plan-for-carbon-dioxide-storage/article_3a5a3b42-0de6-5621-8e60-dd446b50244b.html

EPA approves FutureGen plan for carbon dioxide storage

16 hours ago  • 

Updated at 6:25 p.m.

CHICAGO • The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday said it has approved permits for the FutureGen clean coal project to store carbon dioxide underground, a key step in the longstanding plan to build the project.

FutureGen plans to store carbon dioxide, a greenhouse linked to climate change, after capturing it from a power plant in western Illinois.

“The issuance of the permit is a major milestone that will allow FutureGen 2.0 to stay on track to develop the first ever commercial-scale, near-zero emissions coal-fueled power plant with integrated carbon capture and storage,” FutureGen Alliance CEO Ken Humphreys said in a printed statement.

The FutureGen Alliance is a group of coal companies that are trying to build the $1.65 billion project with $1 billion in financial assistance from the U.S. Department of Energy.

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Home Energy Use Has Shifted – Appliances now take more juice

I am really shocked by this article. The idea that residential energy consumption could change so dramatically  in only 16 years is so amazing. Its like when we shifted to coal or later when we shifted to natural gas and then electricity. Only nobody is really talking about it.

 

http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=10271

March 7, 2013

Heating and cooling no longer majority of U.S. home energy use

For decades, space heating and cooling (space conditioning) accounted for more than half of all residential energy consumption. Estimates from the most recent Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS), collected in 2010 and 2011 and released in 2011 and 2012, show that 48% of energy consumption in U.S. homes in 2009 was for heating and cooling, down from 58% in 1993. Factors underpinning this trend are increased adoption of more efficient equipment, better insulation, more efficient windows, and population shifts to warmer climates. The shift in how energy is consumed in homes has occurred even as per-household energy consumption has steadily declined.

While energy used for space conditioning has declined, energy consumption for appliances and electronics continues to rise. Although some appliances that are subject to federal efficiency standards, such as refrigerators and clothes washers, have become more efficient, the increased number of devices that consume energy in homes has offset these efficiency gains. Non-weather related energy use for appliances, electronics, water heating, and lighting now accounts for 52% of total consumption, up from 42% in 1993. The majority of devices in the fastest growing category of residential end-uses are powered by electricity, increasing the total amount of primary energy needed to meet residential electricity demand. As described in yesterday’s Today in Energy, increased electricity use has a disproportionate effect on the amount of total primary energy required to support site-level energy use.

Other notable trends in household energy consumption include:

  • The average U.S. household consumed 11,320 kilowatthours (kWh) of electricity in 2009, of which the largest portion (7,526 kWh) was for appliances, electronics, lighting, and miscellaneous uses.
  • On average, residents living in homes constructed in the 1980s consumed 77 million Btu of total energy at home. By comparison, those living in newer homes, built from 2000 to 2009, consumed 92 million Btu per household, which is 19% more.
  • Space heating accounted for 63% of natural gas consumed in U.S. homes in 2009; the remaining 37% was for water heating, cooking, and miscellaneous uses.

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How We Use Energy In The Home – Natural gas is big

Most environmentalists go after coal fired power plants. They make a mistake. Methane is a much more dagerous and persistent gas and our houses use more and thus waste more of it.

http://needtoknow.nas.edu/energy/energy-use/home-work/

How We Use Energy

Home & Work

We use energy in homes and commercial buildings in similar ways. We keep rooms at comfortable temperatures, provide lighting, heat water for bathing and hand washing, and power computers, copiers, appliances, and other technologies. Many of these luxuries weren’t even possible 100 years ago—and they require a lot of energy. In 2008, 41% of all the energy consumed in the United States went to powering homes and commercial buildings.

Many of these luxuries weren’t even possible 100 years ago—and they require a lot of energy.

Whether you live in an apartment, townhouse, or a single-family home, chances are you want to keep it warm in cold weather. Data from 2006 show that space heating accounts for the greatest energy usage in the residential sector, with the rest devoted, in decreasing proportions, to appliances, water heating, and air-conditioning. At 7%, electronics usage surpasses washers/dryers and dishwashers, cooking, and computers in energy use. Appliances such as refrigerators, water heaters, and washers/dryers are all considerably more energy efficient than they used to be, thanks to legislation that requires appliances to meet strict standards.

In U.S. homes, natural gas is the most widely used energy source (49%), followed by the secondary energy source, electricity, at 39%. That’s reversed in commercial buildings, where electricity (55%) is depended on more than natural gas (32%). The commercial sector includes a broad array of building types, including offices, grocery stores, sports arenas, schools, shopping malls, hotels, and hospitals. Practically any space where groups gather falls into this economic sector. The energy needs for these different buildings vary but when viewed as a whole, more than half of the energy used in commercial buildings goes to just heating (36%) and lighting (21%). Within this sector, retail stores and service buildings use the most total energy (20%), followed by office buildings (17%) and schools (13%).

For a fuller picture of energy use in these sectors, explore Our Energy System.

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