With your focus on the Democratic presidential race, you may have missed a major development in the field of renewable energy. Global warming was a hot topic before the election season began. Just check out last summer's archives if you were not around to remember........
But if you lived in the second smallest state of Delaware, you would be watching daily for any new development in Bluewater Wind's proposal to supply a large segment of that state's residential needs with offshore wind power. What makes this story newsworthy, is that this deal is so close to being done.
As this battle unfolds there is a part that includes you dear reader, no matter where you call home. for you too can participate in making this happen, should you feel so propelled...... If you personally care about global warming even slightly, here is an opportunity to tell your progeny that you too played a big part at that industry's equivalent of the Battle of Yorktown, settling the score once and for all between carbon fuel producers of energy, and the next century's renewable energy conglomerates........
Currently only 3 people out of 7 stand in the way of preventing Bluewater Wind from moving forward with their application to the US Interior's Department of Mineral Management Service to receive the necessary permits to begin their work...........
The story is fascinating, provides insight into politics everywhere, and would never have come so close, without the influence of bloggers, ordinary people such as yourselves.......
This story germinated in Delaware's legislative session during the year of 2006. Our one major utility company announced our electrical prices would rise 60% starting May of that year. It riled everyone. Legislators, up for election that year, scrambled to contain the damage, which most of them had caused by their deregulating the power companies years earlier. The political pressure was so intense, that House Bill 06 cleared both houses and was signed by the governor on the same day!
Embedded in that piece of legislation, was an overlooked clause {Section 6(5)(1)2} that empowered Delaware's Public Service Commission to find local sources of energy that would improve global warming, drop levels of air pollution, and stabilize the large fluctuations of price increases most recently felt.....
The clause was so small, that I even missed it. It had been inserted by friends of the power company to facilitate its sister company in getting permission to build a natural gas turbine whose electricity it could then sell to its sister at manipulated prices......Well connected legislators positioned themselves to profit from the deal....
But something unexpected happened. A couple of professors teaching at the University of Delaware, researched the possibility of wind power off of Delaware's shore. NOAA Data had been available for years. They also conducted a professional poll which showed that 90% of Delawareans preferred getting power from wind, even if it had a higher price tag.....
They passed their data on to Bluewater Wind, based in neighboring New Jersey.
NRG, which owned an existing coal-fired power plant, stirred the pot by placing its bid for the building of a clean coal facility with CO2 sequestration, on one of their existing properties in the southern portion of the state. They gained Organized Labor's support since building such a large project would utilize many of its local participants currently unemployed from the Bush recession.....If built, it would become the first private clean coal plant.......Finally Bluewater Wind placed two bids, one for a large 600MW, and the other for a smaller wind farm.
When reporting this bit of news, the state's one large paper "front-paged" a picture of Rehoboth Beach with an artist's rendition of how the wind-farm would look twelve miles off shore......I remember the moment well. That picture resonated with those 90% of Delawareans who supported wind and support for the wind proposal began to gain ground....
Delmarva began by threatening a lawsuit, and positioned themselves as being the protectors of Delaware customers' interests, because they were fighting to prevent the high cost of wind from ever entering the pockets of their customers.
Bloggers sprang into action. With their broadband access to unlimited resources, they often had a better grasp on facts than did the power companies themselves. They began exposing the lies.
At first the power company published an unfair comparison of just how much more expensive Bluewater Wind was......Overnight, bloggers published the evidence showing the power company was using 2005 prices as its comparison, prices occurring before the price hike that started the whole process rolling, and that those prices were already 60% lower than what was currently being paid in real time....
Next the power company used their consultant's report which showed the wind farm to be more expensive. The only flaw, picked out by bloggers again, was that their analysis was based on the premise that natural gas prices would fall and stay lower than they are today for quite a few years.......(Alas, if only it were true..)
The Public Service Commission in an effort to involve the public, held hearings up and down the state. Again over 90% of those citizens who packed their families into the car and drove to these hearings, were in support of wind....There were many reasons...Some were worried about cancer...Some were worried about global warming and the environment, and others were worrying about paying for the high cost of gas, food, and electricity all at the same time. Overwhelmingly the public stepped up to the microphone and said "we want wind."
The power company hired a polling companyto push-poll residents living in the southern part of the state to find weaknesses with which they could then exploit against the windpower proposal....Even then, their own skewed data within a very biased poll, found that a super high percentage of Delawareans wanted the wind power deal to go through........
Realizing that they could not win against overwhelming public opinion.......they turned to our state's corrupt legislators to build their firewall. They found one willing Senatorwho had used his power to place himself in charge of a our small state's renewable energy program which would be independently funded by REC or Renewable Energy Credits. When that committee was formed, no one knew really knew what REC's were. Now some jokingly consider they may one day replace the dollar as our standard measure of money.....(They certainly would be worth more). Both realized they had a common enemy who could cost them both dearly......
A ring of four Senators formed, all of them powerfully connected, and they began a campaign to frustrate and diffuse the Wind deal....
The hinge point in that law (HB 06), passed and signed in one day, was that a vote of four entities, would determine the outcome. One of those bodies was the Delaware Public Service Commission, in charge of determining the winner. The second was the state office in charge of protecting the environment and dispensing of our Natural Resources. The third was the Budget Office (representing the camp of Governor Ruth Ann Minner), and the fourth, was the Controller General of the state's legislature... The outcome had to be unanimously voted upon by all four groups if the deal was to go forward....
At this point, the Public Service Commission surprised everyone by giving Bluewater Wind its approval, and ordered it and Delmarva Power, a division of Pepco, to negotiate between them, an agreement they could work with, to be latter approved and signed by all four entities.
The negotiations took place over last summer, and progress seemed to be made. Then, within the last minutes, of the last hour, of the last day of turning in the final agreement, Delmarva Power added to their version of the agreement, that they did not subscribe to any of those items they had agreed to and signed within the agreement, thereby effectively undercutting the agreement to be null and void.
Simultaneously the four Senators working against the wind farm, unceremoniously called the "Four Whoresmen of the Apocalypse" by one blogger, began their frontal press to derail the process. They ordered the Controller General to confer with them before placing his vote. (These four controlled his salary which was determined solely by the Legislative Committee upon which they sat).
They began to attack the wind farm in the state's one all-state newspaper. Again bloggers jumped in with both feet.
They first pointed out that those senators were using data compiled from the late eighties. They steered the public to more current data that showed the wind farm would guarantee energy prices at or below today's price,for a period of twenty five years! They used the US Energy department's own energy figures to show that still in twenty five years, we would be paying less for electricity than 20 states currently pay now....
Other bloggers uncovered evidence that global warning had already reached the exponential part of the curve where it starts to shoot up vertically. Citing melting ice statistics in Greenland, they translated it into timely predictions of the removal of the Arctic ice caps, which in turn translated itself into a map showing most of the Delmarva peninsula lying under sea water.
Bloggers uncovered evidence that just as hard as four corrupt senators were fighting to stave off shore windpower, the rest of the world was straining to move forward at breakneck speed,.. to acquire it!.......Against charges that wind power was experimental and could not be trusted, bloggers provided evidence time and time again. That data showed great economics were available from wind.
The power company then changed their tack..They began to argue that since they were not allowed to bid for their own wind farm, the process should be scrapped, started anew, and done over....One blogger scathingly likened it to redoing last year's conclusive Super Bowl"because the predicted favorites"...did not win......
As the vote came neigh, three of the four voters were in favor. The fourth, expressed that he was personally in favor of voting for wind, and based on the evidence he wished he could vote for it, but he could not for he had been ordered not to do so by the General Assembly (or four Senators representing it),
This outraged other members of our General Assembly...They and their constituents supported the offshore wind park. How could four Senators preclude to speak for them in that way?
The four Senator's began to attack Bluewater Wind by committee. Holding hearings within the Senator's Energy and Transit Committee, only those against the coming of windpower to Delaware, were allowed to speak. They angered Delaware citizens by waylaying the head of the Public Service Commission with a gestapo type interrogation taped for an intimidating possible future court deposition.....Not being a in a court room meant there was no judge present to step in and prevent abuse of the witness. In other hearings bogus evidence was presented and no opposing views were allowed.
However it almost came to naught, since at least half of the committee itself, was not willing to forward the tainted report to the full Senate. Only after sentences requiring the Controller General to kill the Wind deal were removed, was the report allowed to slip out of committee. As the report became public before its release, leaked version were quickly pointed out by bloggers again, as being based on something other than fact.
Because of the influence of bloggers, and their exposure on talk radio, the state's one newspaper was forced to mention against its will, the opposing viewpoints that had, up to this point always been ignored. Because of bloggers, one of which was repeatedly called by the local news radio station to explain to listeners the intricate details of what was happening, the newspaper's former heroes, who could always up to this point count on the paper's supportive love-fest, now appeared fraught with corruption and tarnish.....The editorial board began to split, and some becoming more critical of those senators, began to emerge....
The state House of Representatives, outraged by a leak of the Senate report, met and voted 25 to 11 to order the Controller General to cast his vote in favor of Bluewater Wind.....The bill was sent to the Senate, where it promptly disappeared into the Senate drawer of the Majority Leader, one of the those four opposed. Eight Senators out of twenty one, are now supportive of that bill. It needs 11 to pass. Three more Senators will open the floodgates that to those of us who have seen our future in statistics, will start the building of off shore wind farms stretching from Maine south to Florida.
If you don't believe that has to happen, just ask one of our bloggers. They have all the answers....when it comes to wind.....
But as I started to say at the beginning, I mentioned that you too could play a big part in getting the ball rolling....This may take some of your valuable time, but if this deal goes through, it will one day save you tons of money for one simple reason......supply and demand.....For as technology advances, day by day, getting electricity from wind becomes cheaper and cheaper per megawatt. With alternative sources, coal, gas, and oil, as every day passes, they get more expensive.......
Once a breakthrough is achieved, things will happen rapidly. And just as Washington needed the French to solidify his plan at Yorktown.....we in Delaware need your numbers to help us......
Our legislators are human. and are frightened to vote for something they don't fully understand, for fear that it may cost their constituent's money. What would help would be a number of calls made by many of you to their staff , requesting that their vote be to move windpower forward.....These conviction-less legislators my not understand the details involved covering capacity charges and REC credits, but they do understand numbers....so please call yourself if you can....
Senators can be reached by phone at:
Senate Democrats Receptionist: (302) 744-4286
Senate Republicans Receptionist: (302) 744-4048
And if you so happen to personally correspond with someone from our fair little state, ask them to call their legislator as well. You can refer them to here if they are unsure of whom to call......
It's down to three people....You can make such a difference.......and maybe, just maybe, the tide will turn against global warming from this small event, just as our nation itself eventually rose to become what it is, from it's own Yorktown........