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Frontlines

The Way We Live, and Renewables

When and Where DG Penetration is Miniscule, What Then?

As fast-growing as it is, rooftop solar will remain a rarity among large proportions of the American public. Which presents a real problem to utilities and utility regulators. Perhaps this is why utility-scale has such appeal.
Byline: 

Steve Mitnick

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Legacy and Generations

We’ll Soon Hand You the Baton

The pasts and futures of automobiles and electricity are remarkably similar. They first inspired a generation. That generation’s grandchildren associate these venerable industries with environmental despoilment and technological obsolescence.
Byline: 

Steve Mitnick

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Future Shocked

New uses for electricity doubtless on the horizon albeit unpredictable

One vision of future power: By 2040, most households had at least one Powered Immersion room, some two or three.
Byline: 

Steve Mitnick

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Consumers Want What?

Rather than accept the rhetoric, let’s find out.

What’s missing is asking consumers to consider realistic tradeoffs between two characteristics of electricity rather than the desirability of a single characteristic in isolation.
Byline: 

Steve Mitnick

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We Made Light Free

As inexpensive as lighting was, twenty years ago, we’ve since made it close to free. Too cheap to meter?

Will lighting drop to a tenth of residential consumption, then below? Every use of a machine, appliance, device shrunk in its significance to the household budget.
Byline: 

Steve Mitnick

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100-to-1 Odds

Why merchant transmission still looks iffy.

The other week, courtesy of Infocast and its Transmission Summit 2002, held in Washington, D.C. in late January, I got to see, hear, and ask questions of three emerging stars of the merchant transmission biz.
Byline: 

Bruce W. Radford

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Electricity's Capacity Factor, a Problem?

Electric infrastructure is used half the time on average. Is this a problem requiring rapid radical reform?

Some of you take the subway to work. What’s the capacity factor of the subway system? Our electric grid provides enormous value to its customers, with a combination of infrastructure and workforces with varying capacity factors.
Byline: 

Steve Mitnick

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