Just like what is happening in the Philippines. The non-engineering congress is debating whether to lower a utility's system loss to 8%, despite:

a) no one here has ever done it b) there is no capital to upgrade facilities

The only reason for the new limit seems to be political in nature.

Thank you for this article. I have a good friend who left his job as a utility company engineer when the company was turned over to accountants and consultants. I don't disagree with persons who want to reduce the use of fossil fuels, but there is a dangerous perception that we can totally rely upon wind and solar power. The public is technically illiterate, and they don't understand that utilty companies must have dispatchable load that they can use when needed. That means we need to continue to build natural gas and coal power plants until nuclear power is expanded, or we will find ourselves in the dark on a hot summer evening when the wind is calm.

This is spot on.

One reason China's economy is growing gangbusters is that their top political leaders are engineers, not lawyers and dare I say pickpockets. I imagine the same is true in India.

We need more professionals and tradesmen in the congress and the legislature - people who have had a job, made a payroll, and made something for society, instead of critics (lawyers) who have made nothing and criticize and hamper those who try and do.

I've only met one real businessman who ran for office. He was a contractor who was also involved in little league and other community programs, and he was well versed on the issues of importance for the town council. He was handily defeated by a clueless banker's wife who had no idea what the town's annual budget was or how many people it employed because she had the right letter after her name for party affiliation.

The guy seems to believe that distributed generation doesn't work, based on some fuzzy examples of home power systems. He doesn't seem to explain why wind power is growing at 30% per year. A 2MW wind turbine is nothing like the homebrewed systems he cites as counterexamples.

Wind generation is growing at 30% per year because investors and utilities have realized that it is cheap to install, pays back quickly, has zero fuel cost and has a plus that it doesn't produce any carbon.

Extrapolating a "Mother Earth News" style homemade solar generating system to criticize a well-run, well-engineered, grid tied wind farm made up of rows of 2MW turbines is like saying we could never get a spacecraft into orbit because Jimmy's Estes rocket went phffft and didn't fly well.

Mike --

Good find!!

This is so true.

Sadly, it also applies to most of our domestic electrical industry.

Regards . . .

Jim