Rolling blackouts in Ferndale raise many questions
Daily Tribune / July 28, 2011
For years, we've watched electric utilities cope with high demand in hot weather by instituting rolling blackouts elsewhere.
Southeastern Michigan, in our memory, has been largely spared those planned, temporary outages intended to share the pain equally within a service area, blacking out an area for a few hours, then restoring power and blacking out a different area.
We can understand that high demand can strain against limited capacity, then exceed it, making those blackouts necessary to avoid brownouts over a much larger area.
But rolling blackouts in a community the size of Ferndale because the distribution system is overheating?
That strains our understanding and tolerance.
Baby, you've got so much to learn it's straining my tolerance.
The city coped as well as it could, opening the Kulick Community Center as a cooling site, notifying residents with robocalls that the center was available. Police fielded the resulting calls from residents asking for more information, and firefighters transported nearly a dozen elderly residents to the center.
It also asked DTE for emergency power. That brought jeers from some bloggers, who chided the city, committed to green energy more than most, for asking for energy from polluting sources.
And that missed the point: Ferndale customers pay the same rates everybody else in the region pays.
DTE blamed the problems on malfunctions at two sub stations in the city, one at Martin Road and Nine Mile Road, the other near Nine Mile Road and Livernois, saying the overloaded equipment was unable to cool.
Were these problems unforeseen? How come?
Because you have your head in the sand about AGW and PO?
I don't know which is worse the author's sense of entitlement or inability to notice the world being turned upside-down.
(In the squeaky voice of a church woman with a mean pinched face) "we pay the same amount".
Lady in your own words can you tell me what an "externalized cost" is?
