On Nov 9, 5:00*pm, Ed Pawlowski wrote:
On 09 Nov 2011 21:11:20 GMT, Han wrote:



The ghastly thing was that gas stations were ALSO without power, so
there was no way to get generator food.

Why didn't any gas stations have generators?

Same reason they don't here. *They cost money and the station
operators don't see a payback in most cases. *CT is considering a
couple of new laws that will required at least some stations to have
generators.

I imagine it could be a $3000 to $6000 investment to do it and while
the oil companies are making money, the local station owner is on a
thin margin.

$3000 to $6000? A neighbor had a 12KW Generac installed at his
house. That was $7K. I suspect to power a gas station you're
looking
at a lot more than that. Still it seems like it might make sense to
require new stations to have them as a public safety measure. Only
problem with that is that new stations don't go up very often and
unless
you mandated it for a significant number of existing ones, it would
take
a very long time to do much good.

A free market solution would be to allow stations to charge whatever
they feel like for gas in an emergency. If I had a station, I'd put
in
a generator and charge $1 a gallon more when the power is out.
That would do several things. First it would make gas availabe during
power outages. Second, it would pay for the generator installation,
maintenance, etc. Third, it would discourage people from buying the
gas during an emergency unless they really needed it.

OF course, our liberal friends call that price gouging and many places
have laws that prevent anyone from doing it. So, the gas station has
no generator, people have no gas, and the workers have the day off
and don't get paid.