Back in 2008, natural gas prices had spiked, and it "appeared" (at least temporarily) that they might stay rather expensive. Texas is very dependent upon natural gas for electricity, so "wind power" was almost economical.

Now, in 2010, with more sources of natural gas seeming to 'pop up' due to the additional drilling in Texas over the last couple years, NG is cheap again. Wind generated electricity costs twice as much as natural gas generated electricity right now. So unless a business is just wanting to "appear green", there's no economic incentive to buy wind power right now. Would you pay twice the price for electricity just to "say" you're buying wind power?

Pickens is above all else a business man. If it won't make money, there's no point in doing it.

But sometimes you do need a key to make a Capital letter. ;)

But like the summary says, it turned in to a boring show where they tried character development, but it just fell on its face. It was just about at the level of a plain drama with a little peppering of sci-fi.

Now SyFy shows wrestling on Friday nights. I won't say that's better than Caprica, but it must be paying the bills...

Instead of relaxing like I've done for the last 10+ years - watching SciFi channel on Friday nights (where did GvsE, Lexx, Brimstone, Dresden Files, Farscape, etc go?), I'm now doing other things with my Fridays... I'm not going to watch wrestling. Talk about fiction!

Here in Texas we saw 'em off.

{Gig 'em.}

http://freediag.sourceforge.net/

You can always get a cheap OBDII interface from somewhere like Multiplex-Engineering and write your own. Or Scantool.net... or any other number of sub-$100 sources. Even Alex's tools at OBD-2.com are good enough. No need to reinvent the wheel though.

Once you start talking about hacking in to your PCM and changing things though, that's a whole other can of worms. People hold the keys to the kingdom on those VERY tightly.

They had a product called the SuperStat. It was a Honeywell programmable thermostat with an RF receiver module inside it. When the utility called for load control, they'd send out a paging signal and the thermostat would kick the A/C off for the amount of time contained in the message.

S-A also had gray boxes that went outside the house for A/C control, and they also worked with water heater and pool pump control. This is nothing new.

Call it "generating negawatts". Instead of positive megawatt generation, we're generating negative megawatts to shave peak. Yes, I worked with these things, and yes, I work for a utility.