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| Rainfall in U S during ice storm Does not include rainfall Jan 4 and 5 |
I always enjoy having an op-ed in the my local Sunday paper. I hope you read it. It's about the probable effects on Vermont when Vermont Yankee closes.
Factors Affecting Vermont Electricity
As I wrote in the op-ed:
Vermont Yankee’s closing will affect everyone in Vermont. It will make our electricity more expensive, more fossil-fuel based and less reliable.
I explained the factors that will affect our power supply and pricing after Vermont Yankee closes. Specifically:
- The plant will not be replaced by renewables. Wind turbine construction in Vermont is practically at a standstill, for example.
- Our power will come from outside Vermont, and be subject to various sorts of interruption, including too few natural gas supply lines, ice storms, and HydroQuebec needing to use its electricity in Quebec during a cold snap.
- The electricity price will follow the grid price of natural gas. According to FERC, the New England price of natural gas is set to rise substantially (from $6.60 MMBTU to $11.75 MMBTU). In the rest of the country, the price of natural gas is set to remain stable.
- Grid payments of $75 million to oil-burning plants (the ISO-NE Winter Reliability Program) will be rolled into our electricity costs.
What About the People at Vermont Yankee?
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| Realtor map of my area Map shows town boundaries Dartmouth is in Hanover My home is in Hartford |
Several people asked me why I didn't mention the people at Vermont Yankee, the effect of the plant closing on the local economy, the effect on the state economy, the effect on the state taxes?
There's a simple reason. I live about sixty miles north of the plant, and I think people in this area don't care very much about southern Vermont. People here generally commute across the bridge to New Hampshire, where they work at Dartmouth College, Dartmouth Medical Center, and many high-tech industries spawned by Dartmouth (for example, HyperTherm).
People here care where their electricity comes from. They care about reliability and about environmental impact. They care somewhat about their electric bills. My own feeling is people here don't care that much about what happens to Brattleboro or Vernon. They are insulated from many aspects of the Vermont economy through their jobs in New Hampshire.
Therefore, for my local paper, I wrote about things that affect all of Vermont: where our electricity comes from, how reliable it is, how fossil fuels will be used to produce our electricity, and how expensive electricity may become.
The Op-Ed
For an op-ed, Yankee's Closing Will Hurt Vermont was very data-dense! Sometimes I wondered--where was the "opinion" part? Why did I write it this way?
Still, it was fun to write, and I plan to reprint it on this blog in a week or so.
However, I always like to have people access the op-ed at the newspaper for a few days before I begin putting it on my own blog. I hope you enjoy the article.
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P.S. Just came across an article in a Boston business journal which says that Boston should expect a 20% percent price rise in electricity this winter, for some of the same reasons I discussed for expecting price rises in Vermont.
