Subject:  peakaboo |
Author:
pjk
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Date Posted: 12/14/05 12:36:11pm
I've been reading the "crazy" guys for a couple few years now and it seems, unfortunately, that their predicitions are coming true. We replaced all the big windows last year and I had about 8" of insulation blown up in the attic this fall. We didn't turn our heat on for all of October and most of November. At night I turn the heat down to 52 or 54 and in the day it's never more than 65 degrees. We wear pajamas at night and sweaters in the day. I experimented with day time temps and under 60 made me just want to curl up with a blanket and sit on the couch and watch TV.
One of the concerns that has appeared in my reading is how will this affect cities... to fuel a police force and fire
departments and my own relative arse, the schools. What will happen to city budgets this winter?
I wasn't kidding about the "hobby" farm in Wisco. Arable land with a water source, pasture and timber...
lots to ponder
The Big Chill
A winter fuel crisis of high prices and shortages could darken homes and factories
By Marianne Lavelle
US News
12/19/05
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/biztech/articles/051219/19energy.htm
Falling gasoline prices make it easy to believe the nation has seen the last of the energy woes that swept in behind this year's Gulf Coast hurricanes. But they don't fool an unemployed woman on the Crow Indian Reservation, using the electric oven to warm her house on increasingly crisp Montana nights because her natural-gas heat has been cut off. For brickyard workers in Mill Hall, Pa., unemployment looms after the holidays, because it will be too expensive to fire the clay kilns this winter. And one retiree in a mobile home in Millinocket plans to take her asthma medication once daily instead of three times as prescribed, to save money to pay the kerosene bills that will soar in Maine's bitter cold.
With the season's first snowfall hitting the Northeast last week, it is becoming apparent that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita did far more to the nation's energy equation than spoil Labor Day vacation drives. The storms upset the already precarious balance of the nation's supply and demand for fuel. So much Gulf of Mexico oil and natural gas production remains in disarray that even with a mild winter, Americans face a Big Chill: astronomical heating bills--on average, 38 percent higher than last year's record costs for natural gas and 21 percent higher for oil.
Triple threat. That means hundreds of closed factories and enormous hardship for low-income and working poor families, who can expect scant federal government help. And if bitter cold rides in on Mother Nature's coattails, extraordinary measures will be needed to keep energy flowing, particularly in the Northeast, as natural-gas shortages spill over into oil and electricity supplies. "We pray for warm weather. We have a prayer chain going," says Diane Munns, an Iowa regulator who is president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners. "People are talking not just about high prices but actual shortages."
Adds Matthew Simmons, a prominent Houston energy investment banker, who has warned of a new era of scarcity: "We're headed into a winter that could be a real winter of discontent."
It is not just about money. Damage to rigs, pipelines, and processing facilities means a shortage of natural gas, the fuel that heats 52 percent of U.S. homes. The industry says 2.3 billion cubic feet per day, or 23 percent of the Gulf of Mexico's natural-gas production, will be offline through March. But even before the deadly storms struck, the country was consuming more natural gas than it produced and prices were at record highs. Demand grew nearly 16 percent from 1990 through 2004, driven mainly by the companies that generate electric power. Policymakers viewed natural gas as cleaner than coal and more palatable than nuclear, so it was easy to get required government approvals to build much-needed electric power plants that run on natural gas. And everyone bet heavily--and incorrectly--that prices would stay cheap. The United States now relies on Canadian imports by pipeline and has begun to call on a new source, tankers from Africa and the Middle East filled with liquefied natural gas, or LNG. But the imports haven't been enough. "The hurricanes--they hit a sick patient," says Roger Cooper, executive vice president of the American Gas Association, representing utilities. "We're vulnerable. If we were hit in the 1990s, we would not have been in this situation. But when you are consuming 100 percent of your supply, there's not much room to maneuver."
The simple economic rule of supply and demand is now at work: The market price of natural gas hit $15 per million British thermal units (Btu) last week, well over double what traders paid last year. Traditional storage measures, such as stockpiling gas in underground caverns in the fall, are not enough. The result: higher heating bills for consumers and hard choices for many businesses.
The 38 workers at Mill Hall Clay Products in central Pennsylvania will be looking for other jobs and collecting unemployment in January and February as their operation shuts down. Company president Robbie Hyde says transportation costs alone for natural gas will increase sixfold at the beginning of the year, as pipeline companies anticipate overwhelming demand in the Northeast. Hyde, who uses 100 billion Btu every year, can't afford to fire the beehive kilns where workers fashion clay chimney flue liners, decorative chimney tops, and bricks. He tracks the gas futures market on his office computer to find a price that will allow him to reopen in the spring. "I don't know if we're going to be able to weather the storm or not," he says. "It's day to day for us."
Out of options. Hundreds of factories will be similarly forced to lay off workers or freeze or cut wages because of high natural gas prices this winter, says the National Association of Manufacturers. Many large companies, like chemical giant Dow, have moved major operations overseas near cheaper fuel. But smaller domestic companies don't have that option. "In manufacturing, there's just one way to use less energy, and that's to make less widgets," says Paul Cicio, executive director of the Industrial Energy Consumers of America.
Industrial shutdowns are actually vital to the current energy market because they curb demand. Without them, prices would be even higher for consumers trying to heat homes.
Already, the bills are taking their toll. Mervalene Eastman fell behind on her natural-gas payments last winter when a $380 December bill to heat her four-bedroom Montana home rose by more than $100 in January and again in February. Eastman was an emergency dispatcher on the Crow Indian Reservation for more than a decade until medical problems forced her to leave her job. Then an aunt took sick and died, leaving Eastman to care for her 7-year-old son. In the midst of this tragedy, Montana-Dakota Utilities turned off her gas service last May. Now she owes not only back payments but a reconnection fee and a security deposit, which total more than $850. That sum has proved insurmountable. Eastman's teenage daughter goes to her brother's house for hot showers, and the family relies on a couple of space heaters. When it's especially cold at night, Eastman admits that she fires up the electric oven (not a safe practice). "My electric bill is so high, what I've been saving to pay MDU I've been tapping into to pay electric," she says, adding she was grateful for a mild November. "Once January comes, I don't know how I'm going to keep everybody warm."
Read the rest at:
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/biztech/articles/051219/19energy.htm
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