Don't Overlook Much-Needed Energy Efficiency Provision in "Smart Grid" Legislation
Posted October 27, 2011 in Solving Global Warming
Yesterday Illinois lawmakers approved a new law allowing Illinois electric utilities to make a major investment in modernizing the electric system, through a combination of smart grid technology, upgraded underground infrastructure, small distributed renewable power and energy efficiency measures.
NRDC fought to ensure that any energy legislation clearing the General Assembly this year would contain a strong mandate for energy efficiency. Not surprisingly, most of the media attention to this issue has centered on the $2.5 billion in smart grid and infrastructure investment. Accordingly, today’s post is mostly to serve as a reminder that the efficiency component of the legislation that passed will create significant benefits for Illinois households and for the environment.
As I wrote in August the legislation contained a provision allowing for the expansion of Illinois’s successful energy efficiency portfolio standard. The expanded energy efficiency policy is designed to ensure that all of the potential for cost-effective savings in the residential market is captured, either by the utility programs which provide customers with incentives to replace lighting, appliances, motors and other equipment, or by third parties who will have an opportunity to bid provide those same energy efficiency services.
- Conservatively, we estimate that over the next six years this expansion will result in saving as much electricity as is used in 150,000 average U.S. households (or about 1.5 million mWh of electricity).
- This savings will lower Illinois electric bills by $650 million per year by 2015, and that savings will total more than $2 billion annually by 2025.
- According to Skip Laitner, Director of Economic Analysis for the American Council for an Energy Efficient, the expanded energy efficiency effort will create 3500 new jobs by 2015, and 10,000 by 2025.
The Illinois General Assembly is to be commended for recognizing the value of efficiency to our wallets and the environment, and making sure that modernizing our electric system includes a big effort to do more with less energy.
Unfortunately, there is still the potential for lawmakers to stumble on energy policy this week by approving legislation to force us all to pay for a big dirty coal plant in Taylorville, Illinois. The last thing our economy needs is to be tied for 30 years to a source of energy that is exorbitantly expensive, and the last thing our environment needs is more mercury and carbon pollution. We urge them to reject this legislation, as they have in previous sessions.
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Comments
Paul Burke — Oct 27 2011 01:45 PM
The Smart Grid included the installation of the much feared and dreaded "Smart Meter" which has ignited a firestorm of protest and demanding that they be removed by homeowners and apartment dwellers, etc.
These meters require electricity to operate pulsing all day long, some every ten seconds or so and they chatter and talk to all the other meters, hundreds of them and even thousands of them all over entire towns.
We are now smothered in an electromagnetic soup of microwave radiation that is unregulated and unstopped, listed as a cancer causing device, 2b World Health Organization, not UL approved, stay back 20Cm says FCC and each pulse, thousands per day from just one meter is 100-150 times above a battery operated cell phone, times (X) thousands of these meters that even on medical grounds the utilities refuse to remove them.
For years in Russia Microwave ovens were not allowed because they change the structure of food making it highly toxic to the body. Without public consent the utilities like Big Brother just decided that Smart Meters were to be installed without the home owners approval, and installed them anyway.
In Europe this is not allowed and is illegal and recognized as unsafe electro-pollution. Even the compact CFL bulbs with ballast resistors puts out unhealthy electro-pollution. NRDC of all groups of lawyers and attorneys has been asleep at the wheel concerning human beings, animals, plants and insects and an unhealthy and unsafe electrosmog and now deadly microwave radiation being hammered at the entire USA without any of them, NRDC, to stop this.
Clearly the electrical utilities have dealt the public an unjust and harmful or worse blow in which NRDC has disappeared in its responsibility to protect the publics and entire planets safety.
We have been treated as dumb stupid morons and are expected to die because of improper and unsafe resonance that supports our cellular make up. The utilities utilize Nikola Tesla's AC polyphase system, it is not their grid it belongs to Nikola Tesla operated by them not for safety but for profit only, as stated in The Last Mountain movie. Profits, not People or our Health.
We live in a DC Universe powered by an AC System controlled by a cartel intent on money and not justice or respecting the publics wishes that these Smart Grid and the Smart Meters be removed and analogs returned.
If NRDC would like information can be sent to them on this illegal operation conducted by a ruling class that uses a energy system in which enviromental safety was an after thought. The American public has been lied to and stolen from. Millions have died needlessly because Bio-Energetics was suppressed and the public told absolutely nothing on the mass media.
Mr. Widemouth — Oct 28 2011 03:59 AM
Smart Meters - something to be afraid of? http://www.squidoo.com/beware-of-smart-meters
Robert — Oct 28 2011 05:30 AM
Smart Meters Are NOT Green.
Concepts and theory sounds great, but upon closer inspection:
1. Customer information from smart meters is NOT formatted for customers and does NOT change customer behavior towards conservation.
2. Increased utility rates may decrease energy usage and that can be done with inexpensive time-of-use meters, NOT requiring expensive smart meters.
3. Cost - Benefit of smart meters is horrendous being promoted to profit the utility companies and their suppliers, not customers or our society or our environment.
4. The Smart Grid does NOT use or require a smart meter on each home. The necessary smart information can be gathered much more efficiently and timely and inexpensively at energy distribution points.
5. The vast amount of unnecessary and nearly useless information to be handled and stored may actually end up raising energy usage.
6. This massive Billions-of-dollars smart meter program will leave NO funds for programs that would truly bring energy saving solutions and the public will not be receptive to real solutions after being burned by these Smart meters.