That's not what I was told. Peak power consumption typically happens shortly after sunset as people turn on lights, TVs, ovens, and so forth. Business and factory loads are winding down at that point but residential loads are winding up at the same time and overlap.

Solar power not only does not help in this case it hurts. There's all kinds of good information on this if you take off your solar powered blinders long enough to read some of it.

Solar is winning? If that was the case then why are these people have a connection to the largely coal powered grid at all? Or, why doesn't the utility just put up their own solar panels then?

Solar power is not winning. If these homeowners with the solar panels on their roof had to pay the real unsubsidized cost of solar power they'd be paying about ten times what coal power costs. After decades of solar power research it still makes up less than 1% of the total electric power produced in the USA. That's not even close to "winning".

Natural gas is winning. Nuclear power is winning. Coal is losing. Wind power is in the race but its still too early to tell if it can win. If the government money dried up for solar power today then all the solar panel makers would not open up tomorrow.

Does coal get a lot of government money too? Yes they do. That just means they should stop getting government money as well as solar.

Solar winning in a "free market"? Not likely. I would like to see a free market though. We used to have one in the USA, I'd like to see it return.

Doing things differently can also mean you don't do them at all.

If you ask someone to sign off on a building design under penalty of prison time then you are going to have a hard time finding someone to sign.

Here's another reason why the corporate veil will never disappear. The people that get elected to office are often also people that own corporations. The government is effectively a corporation too. If you tell an elected official that they can get prison time for signing funding for something that ends up killing people then the government will grind to a halt. If we are going to put people in prison for a building falling down then should not the government officials that allowed the building to get constructed also go to prison?

The "evil corporation" argument means nothing to me any more. Fukushima Diaichi was not just built by some evil corporation, is was built within the regulations defined by the government. The government could have shut down that plant at any time for not having a high enough sea wall, insufficient redundant power supply systems, improper site selection, or any of a number of things wrong with that plant. But the government didn't shut the plant down. They allowed it to operate for decades with its flawed design.

Changing the laws won't help. Who watches the watchmen?

The reasons we have nuclear power disasters is because governments will not allow new and safer nuclear power plants to get built. No government official wants to sign off on a new nuclear power plant precisely because they are "too big to fail". What they will do is allow an old plant to continue operating well past its safe operating life span. That's because if it blows up they can blame some politician that is out of office and probably already dead from old age.

Government is not always the solution, sometimes they are the problem. It's odd that you use Challenger as an example for more government, that was a government project from top to bottom.

Exactly. That is how I pay for my natural gas, a monthly service fee and charges for BTUs consumed. In the summer my service fee is typically more than my charges for the fuel but in the winter the fees are a fraction of the total bill.

I have no problem with having to pay for the utility to maintain the connection to the service separately to the services provided. If these people want to have the utility buy their power then someone has to pay for the connection. One might assume the utility should pay but it's not the utility that wins out in this arrangement, the homeowner does. Without the utility there the homeowner would have to invest in an expensive battery pack or have the power go out at night.

Without the connection to the utility the homeowner could not sell their power so the homeowner can pay for that connection. The utility might not mind buying the power but the hassle of having to deal with single provider that provides them so little power they might rather not deal with them at all if the utility had to pay for the line to their property too.

The change does not "discourage" wind and solar any more than any other homeowner provided power source. It just turns out that most people don't have a coal fired steam generator on their property.

I can hear it now, "But shouldn't we encourage wind and solar?" I'm not so sure. If wind and solar can't make a profit on its own merits then it's not a viable energy source. "But coal and oil gets subsidies too!" Yep, and they shouldn't get subsidies either. No more energy subsidies.

I like distributed power and we should have more of it. Problem is that the nature of wind and solar have tendencies to destabilize the electric grid. People with solar panels on their roof spreads out the energy generation sources but without utilities keeping the grid in order the rooftop solar panels don't help much. These homeowners need the utility more than the utility needs them. Let them bear the cost of the benefit of the grid connection.

It doesn't just look like "a car". It looks like a freaking steampunk Hummer. Except that you can hear yourself think because it doesn't use steam.

As if animals in the wild have any choice in the matter.

PETA and their ilk are idiots. Pretty, Egotistical Tits and Ass.

But the question was already answered long ago. Don't you remember?

YES WE CAN!

The problem with "global population growth rates" is only in the developing world. As a society develops, birth rate naturally goes down. Right now Japan is facing a top-heavy population due to declining birth rate, and Europe is also below the replacement rate. I think the US is about flat, but because of immigration. The reason is that as infant mortality goes down (less need for "spare" kids), and as lifestyle options increase, children turn from an asset into a liability. Child labor laws also help reduce the value of a large family, and having children at a later age reduces the replacement rate.

You not having kids isn't going to help the planet. People in India and China having fewer kids makes a much bigger difference.

Don't forget the people living on a... um... "government income", who suddenly won't be able to watch Jerry Springer or Dr. Oz or other fine examples of daytime television programming. Once their big-screen TV set shuts down, you know the first thing they're going to do is grab a large kitchen knife and go on a rampage killing everyone in the neighborhood.

I think there's a bit of a difference between having "good English skills" and spending four or more years of your life taking classes about it, instead of taking classes to learn an actual trade.

The government didn't delay to choose, they have chosen to delay.

Not building the pipeline does not mean the oil won't be produced in Canada and shipped to refineries in the USA, it just means it will cost more to do so. More cost because it takes more energy. More energy means more waste. More waste is bad for the environment.

I thought this president was supposed to stop the oceans from rising or something.

I remember Obama debating McCain when the issue of nuclear power came up. Obama said some non-sense about investigating safe nuclear power. McCain said something about actually building nuclear power plants. We don't stop the rising of the oceans by taxing coal, banning oil drilling, and pouring money into unproductive solar panel factories. We reduce carbon output by building alternatives to coal and oil that actually produce power with less carbon output at a lower price. That means nuclear power.

President Obama, where is this nuclear power research you promised? Shouldn't research in nuclear power involve building nuclear reactors? The research reactors don't have to produce power I suppose but we should see them go critical. Computer simulations can tell us a lot but the theories they provide need to be tested in real life.

We'll verify nuclear weapons designs with real detonations but no government official or agency seems willing to verify nuclear reactor designs with reactors achieving criticality. Perhaps it's more accurate to say no Democrat would allow new nuclear reactors to go critical.

I also thought we were going to get an "all of the above" energy policy from the Democrats. No nuclear power so far but we've got windmills that kill endangered birds. Maybe I need a Republican in office to get energy choices that mean reduced carbon output. Maybe we'd get pipelines to transport natural gas to wells aren't forced to burn it off on site. Maybe we'd get oil wells in places that don't involve polluting large areas of the ocean floor. Maybe we'd get solar panel factories that produce product. Maybe we'd get electric cars that someone other than the 1% could afford.

Let's assume the Republicans take control of both the House and Senate. Does that end the delay? Or, would the Democrats not allow the Republicans to take credit? What if the Democrats win both houses? Would they still decide or keep holding on so they can use the issue again for the next election? Something tells me that only the Republicans will allow this pipeline. Then we can stop spilling oil into our oceans, killing endangered birds, and see real transition to nuclear power.

The Republicans are greedy, corrupt, assholes that don't deserve any government office. At least they have a plan to produce energy that doesn't involve killing rare birds, covering beaches with oil, or burning off natural gas at the well head when it could be burned for heat.

I hate having to choose the lesser evil.

Tell me, how much does the government make on every gallon of gasoline sold? I honestly don't know what the number is but I'm quite sure it's more than 7 cents.

Who's more "greedy" and "evil"? The oil companies for making 7 cents or the government that makes far more? I speculate the federal government does not really have their heart in finding alternatives to oil because they have not figured out how to tax it yet. Since they don't know what "it" is just yet they can't tax it.

If we ever do figure out what will replace oil then I suspect it will not be because of government funded research. The government is a political entity, not conducive to the quick thinking required of real honest research. I feel that the federal government will have to release its grip on energy willingly or see the new economy race beyond its reach. Either way the size and scope of the federal government, and therefore its tax burden on us, must shrink.

If farmers were not forced to destroy their alcohol stills in the early days of Prohibition we would have known long ago about the viability of biofuels. Almost a century ago farmers would make ethanol for use as a fuel to run tractors. No doubt they'd also drink some of it, or sell some of it for others to drink. Prohibition destroyed the hobbyist experimentation of ethanol as a fuel. It made any use of ethanol a legal nightmare.

When Prohibition was lifted it didn't improve things much. Ethanol production was tightly controlled for anything beyond what the government deemed as "private use" amounts. This held up ethanol fuel experimentation until the 1970s. Even to this day no one would even consider ethanol as a fuel without the blessing, and a big pile of cash, from the federal government. Anyone doing otherwise runs the risk of jail time for "bootlegging". Something I'm sure is enforced as much by the whiskey producers as it is from the people that get the big piles of cash from the government for biofuels.

There's all kinds of things we could have learned if it wasn't for crushing taxation and regulation by the federal government. It's not that I'm some sort of anarchist. I think we need a strong government. If the federal government was truly interested in finding energy solutions they'd have to look at what laws are in place which prevent experimentation.

If the government wants people to experiment with, for example, the effects of ethanol on modern internal combustion engines then they'd have to make it possible to manufacture the ethanol without two full time lawyers and a dozen clerical workers. But the government is not interested in finding energy solutions. The government is interested in buying votes.

If the government was interested in finding energy solutions they'd also let people build nuclear power plants. I believe ethanol to be a dead end technology. Prohibition prevented us from figuring that out nearly 100 years ago. So, we'll have to go through the motions, and piles of my tax money, to prove it. Then what? We'll have to go through nearly 100 years of no effective research in nuclear power to figure out that it is possible to make safe, cheap, and abundant, nuclear power.

To those that think nuclear waste is some sort of unsolvable problem I say you need to look up waste annihilating molten salt reactors.

And this being Portland, it's probable that homeopathy is enforced by city ordinance.