Colin McEnroe Show: Would Town-Controlled Power Grids Get The Lights On Faster?
As frustration with CL&P mounts, should towns start maintaining their own grids?
Jewett City, a community of 2.5 square miles in southeastern Connecticut, has its own power company, owned by the town.
There are seven non-profit companies like this in the state. They're small, which means they can coordinate closely with other branches of government. Heck, they can coordinate with branches on trees.
Ken Sullivan, who runs the Jewett City utility is probably on a first name basis with most of the squirrels who run on his lines. The utility does all of its own tree trimming. Outages tend to be short. Most of the people I heard from who live in towns like Wallingford, which also has its own power company, speak in loving tones about low rates and great customer service.
But many of those systems have been around since the end of the 19th century. What does it take to convert from what you have to a non-for-profit town system? That's just one of the topics we'll tackle today as we look at Winter Park, FL and Boulder, CO.
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would town controlled power etc...
excellent discussion. Please keep at this. Why isn't all of our CT utilities non- profit status?
would town controlled power grids...
The reparations money that NU is proposing to disburse should be multiplied by 100 and distributed to Towns to set up their own power grid solutions. If they can oversee snow plowing it is a do able thing to create their own utility oversight and repair linemen. No more talk Let's have some action!!!
E-mail from Dominik
The towns that did not have power all this time should use eminent domain and take back control of the poles/electric lines and start their own service like Norwich/Walingford.
E-mail from Kevin
Listening to this I can’t help but think about all the money that was spent to upgrade transmission lines to Fairfield County over the past few years – seems like distributed generation might have gone a long way to reducing this need while creating a better system. Wasn’t there a proposal for some of this type of generation that was not allowed by a government regulation or decision??
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