Mike26

  1. Yes, I'm stupid. You got me. I'll help you with where electricity "come" from.

    Oil needs oil fired boilers with steam turbine generators. We generally don't see these because of economic forces, you make more money converting furnace oils to gasoline. You don't see these here, but visit remote islands, and you'll find oil generators.

    Natural gas needs natural gas fired boilers with steam turbine generators. These are very economical and you can find them employed by most utility companies. They do, however, require significant upfront investment to build gas pipelines to deliver the natural gas.

    Coal needs coal fired boilers with steam turbine generators. These are also very economical if it wasn't for the Federal regulations that require large investments to stay in business. Wherever you have a railroad, you can build a coal fired plant. If natural gas pipelines are available, coal generators will go out of business. See State Line.

    Hydropower requires locating a valley and flooding it. You haven't seen this large scale in the US since the Hoover Dam. You haven't seen the US commit to this to the scale of relocating peoples homes since the TVA. So its not just an environmental issue, its a social issue of flooding cities and towns like the Chinese did for the Three Gorges Dam.

    Nuclear requires mining uranium, enriching the uranium, heating heavy water, then running this heavy water through steam generators and use turbine generators. They are clean as long as you manage the spent uranium, see Yucca Mountain. Nuclear may be clean, but because the scare of catostrophic meltdown (see Three Mile, Chernobyl and most recently Fukushima), nobody will accept nuclear in their region.

    Biofuel is a Panzie scheme on today's investors. It takes more energy to grow, maintain and harvest the biomass than you get for the biofuel product. It will never be economical without heavy subsidies. Even with that, you will need traditional energy to close the energy imbalance of producing Biofuel. Take away subsidies and the ethanol plants will close.

    Wind is clean, but not practical. The huge windfields don't compare to power generation of coal or natural gas. The largest farm in Indiana (from in.gov) covering 50,000 acres is Fowler Ridge Wind Farm (BP) in Benton County. It has 355 turbines generating 600 MW. The State Line coal plant generated 515 MW with a handfull of generators to maintain. Most laughable on wind energy is the fleet of fossil fuel trucks required to travel the windfarm to service the turbines.

    .
    March 16, 2013 11:39 am on Obama says U.S. must shift cars, trucks off of oil
  2. I am so discouraged by the President. His comment "United States must shift its cars and trucks entirely off oil to avoid perpetual fluctuations in gas prices" illustrates his incompetence. Where does he think the electricity will come from? Does he think the electical grid is immune to supply and demand swings??? Why, in his radical left model state of California, they have restricted free enterprise so much that they have had rolling blackouts during high demand. The only thing that has kept electricity prices so low right now is the discovery of world scale natural gas deposits by.....gasp,...the oil industry.

    Sorry, but its a fact. Our President is an idiot and our voters worse for electing him. This is what you get from an electorate who pays more attention to attack adds than studying candidate platforms.
    March 16, 2013 9:51 am on Obama says U.S. must shift cars, trucks off of oil
  3. Can somebody explain why I have to pay $3 to cross a glorified creek while the state funds a new free bridge to cross the Ohio River??? I'll take other routes out of principle.
    March 09, 2013 7:05 pm on Cline Avenue Bridge building preparations begin
  4. Iggy, I haven't heard of any mention of charging for park amenities other than for renting out the shelters. They have charged for parking for non-residents (whiting-roberstsdale), I'm guessing this will continue.

    J Bird, I share your concern about the maintenance costs (minus the pessimism). I asked the mayor about the costs in the early public meetings. His response was that the project stages were designed to attempt to keep revenue increases ahead of costs. I'm guessing this is why the ballpark was completed first. Whether they were successful or not is a debate. My observation is that they struggle to keep the bike path parks in order during the summer, so I'm thinking they are struggling with this. This concern is exactly why Whiting should bend over backwards to attract limited commercial development within the lakefront park.
    March 03, 2013 8:49 am on Work to pick up on Whiting lakefront project this spring
  5. This is terrible and dishonest. Any other drunk driver would have their name available to the public. But because this is a police officer, they suddenly care about privacy. They need to be consistent and prosecute the officer fairly and drag his name through the mud like everybody else.
    September 28, 2012 11:26 am on Sheriff's officer on unpaid leave following traffic stop
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