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Grand Forks North Dakota E85
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farmer4321
Posted 1/20/2019 13:52 (#7258901 - in reply to #7258077)
Subject: RE: Maybe the answer is.....


Maybe the answer is to adopt the deregulation model that NY and some other states did with their electricity utilities. Prior to about 20 years ago individual electricity utilities had monopolies over their respective areas. That is each power company was more or less responsible for both the generation and distribution of power in their market areas. The exceptions were hydropower which NY has a good deal of and some nuclear power from state built & owned reactors The problem was that these monopolies had no incentive to sell the cheaper power that was becoming available from sources like hydropower from Quebec. And there were other problems. It became apparent that it was impossible to evacuate urban areas near downstate nuclear powerplants especially after it was revealed that they had serious safety problems.
The response was to separate the power generation from the power distribution. Each year each customer gets to sign up with the power generator who offers them the best deal and the distribution company bills at a fixed rate controlled by the public service commission. It all shows up on the bill as two charges, generation & distribution. Companies were created almost over night to buy wholesale and resell retail power. Even local oil companies got into the business. You almost always have three choices and good sized users can negotiate pretty good deals.
Almost immediately the power companies sold off their more expensive coal-fired plants and started buy the cheaper power from whomever would offer it. Those coal-fired plants either closed or became backup power for the nuclears. (Nuclear plants go off line more often than you might think).
The upshot is the power distributors became a lot more .accepting of whomever would generate the power, including small scale solar. It didn't matter that much anymore who generated the power because the billing system was already there and in place. Landfills that were burning off methane simply installed a row of tuboprop jet engines mated to generators and put the power on the grid. Factories that need a lot of process steam would burn the natural gas thru gas turbines and sell the power ahead of the steam boiler.
It doesn't take much to imagine a similar system for liquid fuels. Just separate the fuel distributors from the producers and let the producers compete to sell components.
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