Duke Power Wants To Charge You… For Saving Energy
ByDoug Gibson over at Between Elections has taken a look at what Duke Energy is offering its customers:
“Where it gets weird is in the reward Duke sought for being virtuous: a new fee (starting at $15 per customer per year) that would compensate the utility for the electricity it didn’t sell because of decreased demand. That fee was based not only on program costs or unsold wattage, but also on the cost of the power plants the utility would have had to build if customers didn’t conserve.
That’s not how they phrased it, of course: Duke Energy’s spin was that they would be generously allowing consumers to save 10% of the cost of producing and supplying the energy they didn’t use. But turn that around, and you see what’s really going on: Duke essentially wanted to sell this “fifth fuel” – ghost power produced by ghost plants – for almost as much as they sold real power produced by real plants that they themselves built. That’s a neat trick!”
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April 2nd, 2008 at 8:17 pm
A Palo Alto company called Nanosolar is making photovoltaic cells with inkjet printing technology. This is a disruptive advance. 2006 MIT Technology review article: http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?ch=specialsections&sc=solar&id=17025&a=
Their website today: http://www.nanosolar.com/
They are shipping panels right now, but their first year’s output is already sold to Germany. Thom Hartmann was talking about how they’re doing solar in Germany. Banks are required to lend you money to install panels; the utility has to buy your excess at 7x the going rate; the utility buyback just about covers the cost of the mortgage on the panels. The panels are paid off in about 10 years and last about 50 years so you get 40 years of free electricity. He went on to say that southern exposures are considered very valuable in Germany, that from the train you see panels everywhere, and that if this system works so well in Germany, not exactly a sunny clime, it would work anywhere.
The power companies and banks, it must be noted, do the right thing in Germany because the government requires them to. When the government does things because the corporations require it to, bad things are done. SO:
(People > Government > Corporations) Good
(Corporations > Government > People) Bad
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April 3rd, 2008 at 3:18 pm
Does Duke Energy have any customers in Asheville? What about in Buncombe County? I realize that Duke Power is the power company for folks down in Murphy, Nantahala, Cherokee, etc.
I thought that Progress Energy was the electricity supplier here.
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