On Nov 9, 2017, Ed Huntress wrote
(in ):

On Thu, 9 Nov 2017 12:43:58 -0500, "Jim Wilkins"
wrote:

"Larry wrote in message
...
On Wed, 8 Nov 2017 17:45:28 -0500, "Jim Wilkins"
wrote:


Week-long storm outages tend to occur in relatively narrow strips,
like between all snow and all rain, or wind and flood damage near
the
coast. They aren't regional like power generation blackouts which we
haven't suffered yet, though our safety margin is shrinking due to
political opposition to coal, nuclear, pipelines and Canadian hydro.

Aren't Leftists wonderful? No to this, no to that, no to the other,
then SAVE ME from everything--after they've hosed any systems which
could have.

Maybe we need two governments. One large one to serve just the
Leftists covered by massive taxes paid only by them, then a small
one
to serve the actual Americans, with few taxes paid only by us.

The government they long for would ship their useless butts to the
gulag.

_Forbes_ says that Maine's power problem is the grid, not generation:

[Nov. 5, 2017]

"Nearly half of the people living in Maine spent a significant part of
last week in the dark after a storm caused widespread power outages.

"Central Maine Power, a subsidiary of the Spanish utility holding
company Avangrid, reported an estimated 400,000 customer accounts €“
more than 60% of the utilitys customer base €“ were without service on
Monday...

"...Solar companies did not cause the prolonged power outage in Maine.
Neither did deregulation. CMP did. Yes, the same utility company with
the slogan "Flip a switch and we're there."

"Contrary to what one would suspect based on the slogan, CMPs
incompetence and lack of planning turned what should have been a short
power outage into a prolonged and painful experience. The mega-scale
utility projects proposed by CMP and supported by LePages
administration would not have made an iota of difference.

"The CMP Maine Power Reliability Program (MPRP) certainly did not keep
the lights on in Maine despite the programs $1.4 billion price tag."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/william...ers-should-be-
outraged-over-worst-power-outage-in-maines-history/#104f6b79fc96

What do you think? Are they right?

Not enough information to tell.

However, I read the Forbes article to imply that there had been decades of
deferred maintenance on Maines power distribution system, and MPRP was the
funding vehicle chosen to make the down payment of bringing the distribition
system up to snuff.

In Puerto Rico, they had the same problem, but no MPRP equivalent, and the
hurricanes blew the existing ramshackle system into the sea. Total
replacement is underway. Probably take a year.

Fortunate for Maine that they are too far North for real hurricanes.

Joe Gwinn