White House To Announce IT-Powered Smart Grid 320
FizzaNawaz writes "On Monday, the Obama administration is preparing announce the next steps that the US will take to build its 21st century electric grid, and IT is expected to play a big part in the plans. The White House is hosting a 90-minute media event called 'Building the 21st Century Electric Grid' and is releasing a new report on what it will take for lawmakers and the private sector to come together to solve this aspect of the energy challenge."
Please Stop... (Score:5, Insightful)
... And actually put some thought and investment into a secure infrastructure, this time? The existing implementations are horribly reliant on auxilliary security controls, such as firewalls, to protect systems that rely on plaintext passwords and access controls to protect them from buffer overflows and other rudimentary vulnerabilities. These systems, and the NERC CIPS policies that act as a paper armor against scrutiny, present a real danger to our infrastructure, and pouring more money into procurement is really going to make things worse.
I might be afraid (Score:3)
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Will Siemens have anything to do with the 21st century electric grid?
I hope not. Siemens does our corporate IT. As well as that works, it will be cheaper, cleaner, and more efficient to build a leaky 1960's technology nuclear reactor in every backyard.
Also a pony and a flying car for everyone. (Score:2)
Uh, yeah. Doesn't matter how "smart" you make your grid, every watt used h
Re:Also a pony and a flying car for everyone. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Also a pony and a flying car for everyone. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Sheesh, can't you even read the title?
White House To Announce IT-Powered Smart Grid
I just invested in treadmill manufacturers.
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White House To Announce IT-Powered Smart Grid
I just invested in treadmill manufacturers.
I just invested in industrial sized cremation ovens, and steam generators. Tomorrow morning I tender my resignation from IT.
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I just invested in G.E. - who else will they "award" this contract to, except for their very-own "Haliburton"?
Maybe you should stick to what you know (Score:5, Informative)
Lots of generated power goes to waste. Our current grid is effectively "dumping massive amounts of power into a hole." The smart grid helps to reduce that waste.
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My understanding is that power companies add and remove power sources throughout the day as demand changes. Only a small amount of "waste" exists as a buffer against spikes in electrical demand.
Re:Maybe you should stick to what you know (Score:5, Interesting)
There's long distance transmission losses - electricity used to push more electricity along high tension wires for hundreds or even thousands of miles. When a plant in western Pennsylvania or even southern Georgia is sending power to meet peak demand in New York, those transmission losses can be over 50% of what's produced. When the north-eastern grid failed a few years ago, TVA plants in Tennessee and even South Carolina were sending power all the way to Arizona and New Mexico to stabilise the western grid, at up to 85% losses. (And if they hadn't, that blackout would have been nationwide and probably lasted a couple of days minimum for everyone). So yes, "dumping massive amounts of power into a hole" sometimes describes it quite nicely.
Interestingly, it was a locally smart* power grid, built and managed mostly by the government, that basically became a rock solid line against the cascading failures and then started helping everybody else recover.
*TVA's not all that smart - built mostly during the 30s and 40s, but it has upgraded control networks several times since then, notably when the nuclear plant at Watt's Bar became part of the grid. Basically, TVA control is 1970s tech, but the north-eastern grid from Niagara on down includes a lot of incompatible privately implemented control systems dating back, in some cases, to the 1920s.
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Thats the "theoretical" loss if you had a direct connection from point A to point B, but that is not the case.
You have a layered system of high voltage networks. Your plant is only feeding the higher level network and not directly to NY.
The
Re:Also a pony and a flying car for everyone. (Score:4, Interesting)
if you want to reduce the need for power plants, you're talking about reducing demand, and the only way to do that through the grid is to turn people's stuff off whether they like it or not.
That would only increase demand. One way to reduce demand for power, and it works well for anything but is not popular, is to tax the living hell out of energy usage that goes beyond some acceptable and reasonable daily allotment. This way energy hogs would subsidize the energy cost for those that conserve.
Re:Also a pony and a flying car for everyone. (Score:4, Insightful)
You have no idea what you're talking about. Apart from many ways already to store energy generated during low demand at more efficient plants, there's all kinds of ways to conserve electricity with no noticeable decrease in work done by it. In fact the "smart" techniques tend to upgrade the electrical system for better control that improves the value of the work done by it, even as it conserves waste. And then there's the really smart techniques that "turn people's stuff off" only when they want (or don't care about) it.
Just because you don't have the imagination (or research, or hipness to daily news) to realize that smart grids improve the electrical value to its users precisely as it's cutting its consumption, doesn't mean it's not already available. Find out what's beyond your own ability to do yourself before you earn the privilege of dispensing sarcasm about it.
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Re:Also a pony and a flying car for everyone. (Score:5, Interesting)
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we should be *increasing* our use of energy, not decreasing it.
That argument only makes sense if technology remains constant. I remember the energy crisis of the 1970s. This was before computers and micro-controllers were common. It was still quite common in industrial plants to control liquid flows in industrial plants by using a valve to constrict flow from a dumb pump. That meant energy consumption went up the *less* liquid that was moved. Nobody would do it that way now. You'd use a computer controlled pump.
In 1958, a 21" RCA color TV would have nearly 30 vac
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Market-pricing would reduce demand without having to shut anyone's power off.
Instead of personally turning consumers' power off you force them to do it for you.
Solar panels on White House roof (Score:2)
Re:Solar panels on White House roof (Score:5, Informative)
It was Carter who put them up, and Reagan who took them down.
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When Bill McKibben brought back Carter's solar roof panels (that had been stored in Maine since Reagan took them down), Obama promised to put them back up.
That was last year. Obama's got a week and a half [thinkprogress.org] before he misses the deadline announced by Energy Secretary Chu back in October 2010, June 21st.
Re:Solar panels on White House roof (Score:4, Informative)
Not entirely true. Dubya put solar panels on the White House's garden shed:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/10/hey-george-w-bush-put-solar-panels-on-the-white-house-too/64151/ [theatlantic.com]
Why ... (Score:2)
Uncle Fester [fanpop.com] seems eminently more suited to the job.
Life imitating movies? (Score:2)
What this is really about (Score:4, Informative)
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You can already opt into such a program. Peak Corps IIRC
It reduces your summer electric rates and once you've wrapped the box in aluminum foil and grounded it you are unaffected.
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There are small, emergency power generators that run on natural gas [amazon.com]
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Well nobody's forcing you to buy power, you can always vote with your wallet and spend $20k-40k to take your house off the grid :)
Besides, this is an industry-led initiative, you should be happy at the work the free market is doing!
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What a waste! (Score:2)
Don't talk to me about IT being involved until.... (Score:2)
...you first talk about how you're NOT going to outsource said IT jobs to India.
News flash there, Obama. US job "creation" doesn't really count if we get outsourced 6 months later after we design and build the damn thing.
You want to get your lawmakers involved? Then do what's right and keep US jobs in the US.
This IT-Powered Smart Grid brought to you by... (Score:2)
Sony.
given their track record (Score:2)
IT powered?? (Score:2)
I don't know... that's not exactly the body type I'd picture pushing the Wheel of Pain...
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_c4lzk84-Q5U/S_MZB0_tV2I/AAAAAAAAASM/dM18eyQS5kw/s1600/wheel_of_pain.jpg [blogspot.com]
In America (Score:2)
What Obama didn't tell you... (Score:3)
Is that the IT-Powered Smart Grid is ACTUALLY powered by out of work IT professionals. A large hamster wheel has been constructed towards this end.
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Is there anything the government can't keep it's paws out of?
Gundam?
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Private companies are going to pay for multi billion dollar infrastructure without anti competitive exclusive usage of it?
What is the point you are trying to make?
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If you have to ask, you don't get it.
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Clearly.
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Funny)
If you have to ask, you don't get it.
Congratulations, you have successfully demonstrated that you understand what a "question" is.
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Re:Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, God forbid our country actually do something with its wealth. We should all just sit around on our asses, living off the work of our grandfathers, while complaining that nothing ever gets done.
We decided to leave high-speed internet deployment to the private sector. How's that working out? Oh, look, $50 a month for speeds that would make Europeans laugh, and the ISPs are already looking into bandwidth caps on top because they don't want to bear the expense of laying more fiber.
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
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We've not had wealth since the Clinton administration.
I think you mean "...since the Roosevelt [history.com] administration".
...or maybe you meant "...since the Wilson [wikipedia.org] administration".
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Re:Sigh (Score:5, Informative)
Andrew Jackson is the only President to pay off the national debt. Presindent Clinton, with the "help" of the Republicans in Congress was able to restrain spending and get government spending in-line with revenues, leading to a token annual surplus his last year in office, with PROJECTED surpluses if nothing changed from the year 2000 to 2010... Unfortunately, things changed since Clinton left office.
Clinton reduced the annual deficit, yet did not reduce the national debt while he was in office He took office with $4.6T in debt and left office leaving about $5.6T in debt. [source] [wikipedia.org]
Debt is what we accumulate, year after year. Deficit is the new debt we rack-up each year, that gets added to the debt. Debt Deficit
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Well, you can't do much about the debt if you don't have any money left over at the end of each year to pay towards the loans, right? So, lowering the deficit was an effort headed in the right direction anyway. Clinton left us with a surplus. Which Bush immediately turned around and gave back to his rich friends (err, I mean "The American People").
This is Washington in a nutshell: Democrats: Tax & Spend. Republicans: Borrow & Spend. At least the Dems are willing to withstand the public's dis
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
I think many are missing the point here, and their ignorance is astounding. We will never have zero debt. There will never be, nor should there, an effort to pay the debt off completely, as having zero debt is dangerous for our government/country. Our founding fathers were smart enough to plan things this way. If our country owes people, businesses, and other countries money, then those creditors have a vested interest in the continued success, and survival, of our country. The whole point is for our country to have debt. Now the discussion to be had, among those with this basic understanding, is how much debt we should have; mainly as a percentage in relation to our GDP.
I am really tempted to leave my post like this, and let people come out of the woodwork telling me how wrong/crazy I am, but I suppose I need to give full disclosure as I cannot take credit for this idea; it belongs to Alexander Hamilton. I think he had something to do with the creation of our treasury, or something like that....
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That would, no doubt, explain why the national debt increased every year of the Clinton presidency?
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I'm always amazed that people think Clinton reduced the debt. He was reducing the deficit, not the debt. Debt continued to pile up under Clinton, just not quite as fast.
http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/histdebt/histdebt.htm [treasurydirect.gov]
The last time the debt went down was around 1951.
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And when we had higher defense spending before Clinton during the Cold War we created, trained, and funded Al Qaeda. So by the same logic if we have higher military spending we are just shooting ourselves in the foot further down the road.
More accurately, if the military/intelligence is spending money on things that don't pertain to defense of the homeland, we are shooting ourselves in the foot further down the road...
Re:Sigh (Score:4, Insightful)
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First of all, Clinton's defense cuts were hardly "huge." The military budget was what was huge.
Secondly, if you think more defense spending would have prevented 9/11, I'd like to know what planet you're from because it's not earth.
Clinton, for his faults, actually was pretty proactive in trying to fight terrorism in general and Bin Laden in particular. Only one thing would have prevented 9/11, and that's better intelligence and communication between agencies.
Bush bumped up the military spending and it did n
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
We have plenty of wealth. This idea that we're broke is a right-wing lie to excuse robbing the poor and giving to the rich. If we repeal the Bush tax cuts and cut our military down to a reasonable size (say... not bigger than every other county in the world put together), we'll be back in the black in no time. Instead, we get demands to end Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security and Food Stamps, and use that money to give a record-breakingly large tax cut to the top 2%.
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
I couldn't find one provable assertion in that entire post - the gov't collects about $2.6T/year and spends about $4.3T/year, a $1.7T deficit each year (excluding the exceptional TARP, Stimulus, and other one-off spending events). The Bush Tax Cuts "cost" $470BN/year ($400BN/year for the "middle-class tax cuts" everyone was so keen on maintaining, and $70BN/year for the top 1-2% that we simply couldn't afford), and last year our entire military expenditures came to about $660BN/year [wikipedia.org], for all operations, including our "overseas contingency exercises" - that leaves you about $500BN/year short of being "in the black"...
Medicare [cms.gov] & Social Security [cbo.gov] will implode in a few years, something needs to be done - your acceptance of the lie that Republicans want to "end" medicare is exactly why the Democrats have taken their "Thelma & Lousie" approach to simply over-promise benefits and gun it for the cliff...
MSNBC will be glad to know you're reflexively parroting their talking points without question.
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The main cause of our economic problems is the recession. As the economy improves, federal income will improve with it. If our tax rate had been held constant since the 90s, and if our GDP were back at normal levels, we'd be making about $5T this year. So actually, the problem is even less serious than I thought.
Also, those sources that you linked directly contradict your statements. According to them, Social Security will be fine until 2050, and the one on Medicare simply says that the cost will increa
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The main cause of our economic problems is the recession.
Thanks, Captain Obvious! I didn't know that recessions caused economic problems.
As the economy improves, federal income will improve with it.
We've been running deficits since the 1950s. At no point in the last 60 years has our government been able to spend less than what they take in. Good economies, great economies, high taxes, low taxes, Republicans, Democrats... it hasn't mattered. At some point, you have to acknowledge the real source of the problem... out of control spending.
I know Fox has poisoned you. They tell you we're broke.
I don't watch cable news at all.
These two statements you made should be more than enough to prove that you are compl
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Of course, after you look at your W-4 and pay stub, you might also look at the Federal budget, and notice that all that money that is "provisioned separately" is then thrown into one big pile.
And then they spend the big pile.
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Thank you, one dimensional Republican.
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one dimensional Republican
So you're saying he has (or is) a point?
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The Ryan plan eliminates Medicare as we know it. Yes, some older people will be grandfathered in. And yes, it replaces it with a new system with the same name. But those don't change the fact that the system we know as Medicare would end under his proposal.
Furthermore, the official estimates are that his plan would only cover a small portion of health care costs, which means most seniors would be simply unable to afford care, which means they bankrupt their children and die miserable with guilt (or hide
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Yeah, God forbid our country actually do something with its wealth. We should all just sit around on our asses, living off the work of our grandfathers, while complaining that nothing ever gets done.
I'm on it!
Private sector? (Score:2)
We decided to leave high-speed internet deployment to the private sector. How's that working out? Oh, look, $50 a month for speeds that would make Europeans laugh, and the ISPs are already looking into bandwidth caps on top because they don't want to bear the expense of laying more fiber.
The government handing out monopolies is not 'the private sector'. It's actually those companies becoming part of the government. If prices are high and profits are high then you should wonder why competition isn't rushing in to take a cut of the profits. It's because they aren't allowed to.
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
Just a side note.... its a rant if you just complain... its an opinion when you lay out the facts... and its a wise man who offers a solution.
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ts a wise man who offers a solution.
C2H5OH in H2O is the solution.
What was the problem again?
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ts a wise man who offers a solution.
C2H5OH in H2O is the solution.
What was the problem again?
Hea don't leave out the H6C12O6 and CH3CH2CH2COOCH2CH3
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Re:Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right - we should leave networking the grid into efficiency among its many monopolies all to Enron. A private corp will do it right. And quickly, too - none of this waiting around for the government to get around to taking the risks no one else has. Enron will never abuse the market it hosts. It will spend its profits reinvesting in innovation and efficiencies. Keep your government paws off my Enron!
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Is there anything the government can't keep it's paws out of?
"it's" as in "it is" or "its"?
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So what are you saying? that the private sector doesn't think it's worth it, and so we need to ream the tax payers for it, or are you saying that the private sector isn't as forward seeing as the government sector? Uh huh.
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
Infrastructure investments like this are long term. The private sector has trouble thinking past the next quarterly report. The OP might not have meant that the private sector isn't as forward seeing as the government but I'll say it.
Time and time again the private sector has shown that they will only do the bare minimum required to wring every dollar out of the general public with the least amount of effort and if it requires lying through their teeth then so be it.
Need an example? How about the global economic crisis we're currently digging ourselves out of. By the way, the scum sucking leaches in the private sector that caused this meltdown seem to be the first ones that recovered. Funny that? Personally I think these parasites should be buried under so much regulation and bureaucracy that they'd never see the light of day.
So yeah, the private sector can't be trusted to do the right thing unless it's at the end of a very big government stick.
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It's not entirely the fault of the private sector. Shareholders - people who have money to invest but flat-out don't understand business - are just as much of (if not bigger) part of the problem.
An example. Let's say you own a t-shirt printing company that pulls in $200,000 a year. You have no debt whatsoever. Your printing machine is outdated and starting to run down, so you decide to buy a new one - but it will show an overall loss on the quarterly report. Sure, you'd probably end up making back its cost
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Infrastructure investments like this are long term. The private sector has trouble thinking past the next quarterly report. The OP might not have meant that the private sector isn't as forward seeing as the government but I'll say it.
As opposed to the government, which built tens of thousands of bridges, roads, levees, dams, etc over the last century and then utterly failed to maintain them, diverting the tax money generated specifically for that maintenance to other projects, leaving us with crumbling infrastructure that will cost trillions of dollars to repair? That's to say nothing of the even larger miscalculations in the cost estimates of various entitlement programs prior to their enactment and the subsequent decision to drain the
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Interesting)
if you design a system that can be described as 'you can gamble with someone else's money all you want - if you win, it's all yours, if you lose, we got you covered' you seriously blame people who exploited the system? It was an obvious and perfectly rational thing to do. When there is no fear of loss, riskier behavior is unavoidable as there are only 2 options left on the table: a win and a fucking big win. It's universal, that's how people behave - be it sandbox, casino, stock market.
When the building that collapses, architects and engineers responsible for shoddy work have their asses dragged to court, while lawmakers producing crap legislation that brings whole nations to the knees walk free.
Letting banks fail was a right thing to do - it would be painful but it would instill fear in the hearts of banksters. Bailouts made them feel like gods who have the whole world by the balls and now they take the full advantage of the fact
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How much of the power grid is in the hands of private power comapnies - state-regulated monopolies that have to get state approval for any expenditure, investment or rate increase aren't really "private sector" companies...
If your state was worried about implementing a "smart grid" they could simply require thier utility to do it, but they'd have to allow the utility to increase rates to pay for the investment, and oddly, most (but not all [youtube.com])politicians are against the idea of raising electricity rates...
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The software flaw that allowed it has been patched, any device that uses a battery or is on a UPS would be 100% immune, and then I doubt any PC (vs simpler electronic device) that suffered such a fault would continue running (it would cause the mother of all memory errors and lead to a kernel panic/BSOD), so I wouldn't worry about it.
Re:Yea (Score:5, Insightful)
Right, I have to ask this as a (more than likely) ignorant European who probably just doesn't "get" it - but what's with the obsession with "commies"? Who exactly are you referring to? I know that "Back in the day" of the cold war when Russia was seen as the big mortal enemy of the US, most people referred to them simply as the commies, or "communist Russia", but it has been like 2 decades since the USSR fell, who's left? Is it China? Is that who the "commies" are? If so, what has China got to do with the Obama administration?
I genuinely do not know - why are Americans obsessed with communism? Why is it that, for example, a national health service is a bit "communist"? And why does that inherently make it bad? I'm not saying +1 for communism, more along the lines of "Even if it is a tad communist, how can free health care for all actually be a bad thing?". In the same way that Hitler was supposedly a vegetarian (I know he actually wasn't and it's just a myth, but anyway), why does that mean that being a vegetarian is a bad thing? Charles Darwin was supposedly a womanising prick, but that doesn't mean his theory on Natural Selection is any less valid. Not that I think that a free health service IS communist or anything, but I digress.
Anyway, the sum total of what I'm asking is basically -
* Who are the "commies"?
* Why do people care about the "commies"?
* Are people afraid of the "commies" for some reason? Are they thinking that if a new electric grid is built, suddenly Russia will revert back to the USSR or something?
* Is Slashdot communist?
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Disclaimer: I'm Canadian.
On the left side of the political spectrum you have socialists. If you go even further left you have communists. It isn't necessarily that there are "commies", but using the term is a way of deriding certain ways of doing things. Having the government use tax dollars (or in the US case, borrowed dollars) to improve the power grid something might be seen as the left-wing way of doing so; whereas providing tax incentives to private corporations to do the work might be an example of a
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What I'd like to know is how the US government plans to pay for new programs like this?
Well that's obvious. They're going to bankrupt power producers like coal via cap and trade, with this institute high taxation on all non "green" power generation. Ensure that the US goes to a 3rd world country and therefore no one will have any need to worry about power. And oh charge a premium on green power generation, somewhere in the 40-80c/KWH.
The other option is to take out an assload of debt, and at the same time turn in the printing presses again, hyperdevaluate the currency.
In otherwords, he's a
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We're doomed.
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In a word: stupidity.
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In US politics only old people participate[1] since voting isn't mandatory and young people are stupid and lazy[2]. You have to remember that the soviet union collapsed in 1991 and a grand total of 2 years of voters have lived since then. 1 year if you count the last major election (2010). Even if you exclude youngsters you still only have 10 of about 60 years of voters who don't remember the soviet union being around. It's going to be a while before the average citizen didn't have their political pa
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Commies, or Communists, come in many dastardly forms. They include:
1. Pinko.
2. Bolshevik.
3. Russian.
4. Chinese.
5. Cuban.
6. Canadian.
7. European.
8. Anyone of differing opinion.
God help us if anyone of the above manage to infiltrate the US and spread their Communist creed.
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At least the summary doesn't suggest we pay for the smart grid in bitcoin.
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FWIW I checked into creating and selling our extra electricity. I am with a rural co-op so anyones mileage may vary. They required an engineer to evaluate our system and $500,000 in insurance to connect to their grid. When I ran the math on how much electricity I could reasonably provide versus the cost of the insurance I decided it want worth it as a financial endeavor.
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Short answer: It will mostly benefit corporate profits, but if you plan your energy usage carefully, you'll save yourself a little bit as a doggie treat for saving the power company 10 times as much.