In this case, the fire chief said the department would have responded if a person's life was in danger regardless of the fee payment. It was made clear to them that all occupants were out of the house and this was only property conservation so they didn't respond. There is a big difference between saving lives and saving property, which is probably insured anyway (unless the homeowner made yet another massive blunder).

I don't claim they get no benefit, just not enough to support the emergency services that non-residents desire.

I agree with you, which is why I choose to live in a city with emergency services paid for by property taxes, and I assume you have also. The people in this story chose to live in a rural area outside of the city (probably at least to some degree because of the lower tax rate), and because of that have fewer services at their disposal.

What I disagree with is that city services should be forced to provide subsidized services to non-residents; nor should the establishment of a fire department be forced on these residents. If they feel they need fire protection, they should organize a department through the local government or collectively contract for services so that individual properties are not omitted from coverage as happened here. Ultimately it should be their choice, not mine or yours even if we think they chose poorly.

Almost every fire department and EMS service in the USA bills non-resisdents for car fires and crashes in their jurisdiction; coverage for non-residents is rare. This has been the case for many years and completely makes sense, especially for towns which have a major highway nearby. Their entire fire department budget would be blown dealing with car fires and crashes for people who were simply passing through while putting nothing into the local economy. The costs must be recovered without putting that burden on locals.

Yes they are when the residents of this county elected NOT to fund a fire department of their own. The only option for fire protection was for residents to hire contract service from the nearby city. In a second bout of stupidity, this particular homeowner elected NOT to purchase the contract service.

That is true, stand-by generation is completely wasted energy and labor to staff the idled facilities. There are some stand-by peaker systems that do not waste fuel like diesel engines and waste oil turbines, but those do not have big outputs.

That is also true. One other issue with wind turbines on farm land is that the lease agreements the turbine owners have with the farmers often restrict the time of year that major maintenance can happen so as to not destroy the crops or interfere with harvest operations around the turbines with heavy vehicles like cranes and excavators.

Bullshit. And your qualifications are? I am an electrical engineer who works for a system planning consultant on transmission projects in the United States which include both traditional fuel generation and renewable generation. I have worked on design projects primarily in the midwest, west and southwest of the USA. All of my projects in the last 5 years have involved wind integration in some way shape or form (not all have been good).

I'm not ignoring those -- even given the cost of fuel and maintenance, wind and solar are still more expensive than coal and NG. Nuclear is not necessarily a cost item, which depending who makes the calculation is either cheaper or more expensive, but an issue of reliability and sheer quantity of energy produced. The USA uses such a tremendous amount of energy that we cannot provide it without very energy-dense fuels.

I am very familiar with the supergrid concept, and it is not only a European design. Similar implementations are being constructed in China, India and western Russia. The design was initially started in the USA back in the 60s which involved the construction of a high voltage DC line from hydroelectric power in Washington state to LA, California. The project fizzled after that, but research continued. In recent times it has been proposed seriously in the USA, and every time someone does it gets shouted down almost right away by the groups I've mentioned in my other posts. There is no funding to implement a supergrid even though it is a good design. There are many of us in the engineering community who know this but we are not in charge.

This is reasonable, and is already in practice through what is called "distributed generation". It is the generation that is provided by rooftop solar panels, backyard wind turbines, sewage/landfill gas turbines and similar small generators. Virtually all power companies have a DG program that allows small producers to connect to the grid and sell power if they choose to.

I think we need more of this. There is one authority recently granted to the DoE (I believe in the 2005 energy bill) called National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors that begins to address this issue. It gives the Department of Energy some authority in overriding state and local governments and various other legal challenges on major transmission projects when they have met the criteria for being in the "National Interest". There is a one-year period during which anyone can object to the project, there are meetings, reviews, studies, etc and if the benefits outweigh the costs the project continues and the legal challenges are overruled. There hasn't been a major test of this system yet to my knowledge although there are a number of projects nationwide that have been declared to meet the criteria.

Wind farms cannot produce even close to the amount of energy that an aluminum smelter or steel mill requires. As soon as the smelter struck an arc it would stall every turbine in the field. Metal processing plants already have a lot of specialized electrical distribution often with dedicated power plants, massive capacitor banks, harmonic filters and the like to provide them with the power they need.

Physics is really at play here. The towers must be very strong to hold up the heavy lines during the highest wind/snow/ice load predicted for the area. They also must be relatively narrow to fit inside the right-of-way, and they must hold the lines high enough and with great enough separation from each other and from the tower so as to not allow arcing under the maximum expected sway and sag. They also must be durable and last outdoors with little or no maintenance for decades.

Add on top of that people want the lowest possible power bill and fastest construction methods, and I don't see many other options than monopoles with arms or basic steel framework structures.

I have heard of this project in some industry publications. I think it's a good one, but I will add some comments. The stated output of the wind farm is 18MW nameplate. That means under ideal wind conditions, so on the average day it will probably produce something like 12MW and maybe single digits on a bad day. A small coal plant produces 600MW rain or shine and a large plant can do 1200W; a nuclear plant can do 2000W. It takes a lot, lot, lot of turbines to offset one traditional plant making wind more expensive per megawatt.

I would. A lot of people do not for many reasons.

The first is that it's more expensive. Try raising electrical bills 1% to raise capital for a major wind project. Again hearings, lawsuits, studies, public meetings, congressional acts, it goes on and on. It would be an unnoticeable amount of money on the average bill and huge groups will fight tooth and nail to block it. Regardless of the long term advantage.

Second is the environment, scenic, conservationist, NIMBY groups who all have factions that hate wind turbines for a myriad of often conflicting reasons and ideology. When you pose the option, "would you prefer coal or NG?" They always reply with canned bullshit about everyone should conserve and use less therefore requiring no new power plants, which is a reasonable goal to reach for, but is not a realistic energy plan given population growth and basic freedoms.

Third are the entrenched power plant owners who do not want competition in markets where they have enjoyed near monopolies for decades. They are a major force of lobbying against wind development both in government and "grass roots" efforts to clandestinely support the first two groups. If you follow the money that the first two use to hire their lawyers a lot of it comes indirectly from power plant owners.

Compared to producing the equivalent power with coal or natural gas, the distributed wind option is more difficult and expensive. One major reason is that it's harder to operate because the output of wind generators is not constant, consistent or controllable. That means you also need "back-up" generation powered by traditional fuels on standby and expensive power electronic control devices to correct the power factor on line-commutated turbines. What this essentially means in less technical language is that the way wind turbines work is somewhat passive to the grid; they cannot operate without the larger generators online to regulate and control the voltage level. Given a stable voltage and frequency, wind generators can inject supplemental power into the grid but without large generators nearby to provide control and regulation the wind turbines are essentially useless. The equipment that allows wind generators to stand-alone and self-regulate is very, very expensive and not worth the relatively small amount of power wind turbines produce.

It's a complicated balancing act that is harder to set up and manage than a coal or NG plant which essentially has a knob the operator can set and that plant will kick out that much power, voltage and frequency 24/7. There is also the issue of having many more assets out in the field that require annual maintenance and skilled labor.

This is why I'm a huge advocate of nuclear power with wind and solar supplements. Nuclear power is fantastic at supplying base load generation and stability in the grid without the pollution of coal or NG. Wind and nuclear compliment each other very well and reduce the emissions to basically zero while providing plentiful energy. Neither is flawless, but they are a far cry better than coal and NG.

Almost all of the usable land near major cities is already developed or has a development value that far exceeds its value as a wind farm.

Because it is almost impossible in the current legal climate to build the power lines from rural areas into the cities where the power is needed and can be sold at a price high enough to finance the project. There are a LOT of transmission line projects on drawing boards across the country all tied up in endless legal disputes and injunctions. There are complaints from environmental groups about lines going through wetlands, forests, and virtually any other habitat. Complaints from pseudoscience scaremongers about lines going through populated areas giving off "toxic radiation". Complaints from towns, villages, homeowners associations about nearby power lines decreasing property values. Endless permits, plans, documents, studies to upgrade the lines on existing right-of-ways. Every inch of the process is an uphill battle for the power companies, and a huge multi-hundred million dollar project can be held up or torpedoed by any judge in any district along the planned path of the line forcing expensive delays or re-designs. The few major lines that have been built in recent history have taken decades from the first plans to in-service and actually cost more money in legal costs than the cost entire planning, engineering and construction combined.

It is terribly frustrating for those of us in this industry. We know what needs to be done and many ways that it can be done, but our hands are tied.

They collected information which was publicly available from the street. Big deal.

The only answer here is LTO tape stored at a contracted record archival facility. Optical media degrades and is easily damaged, hard drives fail ALL THE TIME and will have obsolete interfaces in a few years. Tape has very long shelf life when stored properly -- it is time tested and trusted. It is not that expensive to get one tape drive and a few carts for each customer.

Doesn't signing up for an account with you kinda defeat the purpose of not giving you any of my information? Even signing up for your vaporware opt out gives you information about me that you will no doubt exploit in some way. In order to opt me out you need to be able to uniquely identify me.

No, it's a different situation. Other businesses can publish responses to critisim. They can refute claims -- a restaurant owner can write a letter to the editor to complain about a bad review. A doctor is legally prohibited from disclosing _any_ information about his interaction with a patient, even if the patient completely lied or fabricated a review.

Yes that's true, but there are bad, dishonest patients out there who will go out of their way to harm a doctor's business, and there's really nothing the doctor can do about it. That is what I see as unfair in the reviewing system.

http://www.greendisk.com

Consider that doctors are forbidden by Federal HIPPA laws from responding to or even acknowledging that they have treated a given patient without that patient's written consent. It really is not fair that the patient is able to post whatever review he wants about a doctor on some website, yet the doctor is forbidden from posting a counter argument or defense of himself against this patients claims.

Perhaps the patient ignored the doctor's advice, skipped checkups, won't stop eating nachos or failed to take medication which contributed to his opinion of poor service from the doctor when in fact it wasn't the doctor's fault. It seems only fair that when a patient publishes a public complaint against a doctor the doctor should be able to publicly address those complaints to clear his name.