The Memory Of A Paper Trail

The other day a business associate from another company asked me for our rate information for irrigation. Our electric rates are public so it was easy to comply with his request – REALLY EASY.  He had the data in hand within minutes of his request.  Then I stopped to think about the “before computer life” I used to live. 

Email has been revolutionary in the world of business communication. The use of email within a business can greatly increase productivity for employees. Although it cannot and should not replace all face-to-face communication and others forms of communication, internal email usage can cover many areas within the business.

Just a decade or so earlier, this request would have required paper, a copy machine, an envelope, ink, a stamp, and human handling by about 5 different people. Today it requires about 3 clicks of a mouse. For that one request alone, that electronic communication probably saved my company about $10-$15.

My granddaughters have never been without a computer. They have not had to rely on a public library to do a research paper and they have never had to fret about missed phone calls from friends. I don’t want to give away my age but a microwave oven was new technology when I was in my early teens.

In the future, all of our kids’ text books will be accessed through tablet devices. They will not need text book covers, a backpack, pens, pencils or erasers. Losing a text book is devastating but can you imagine how catastrophic it will be for this same teen to lose a tablet computer? That tablet device contains her text books, her homework; it contains her class notes, prior school papers, book reports, flash cards, pictures, email, her Facebook page, and her favorite games. It contains her addresses, phone numbers, doodles, diary and her calendar. Whoever found her iPad, Droid Tablet, Playbook or Nook just found her entire life. Scary thought, huh?

It is our future. People insist on finding the most convenient way possible to live their busy lives. They want an easy way to conduct transactions – whether its communication, paying a bill, accessing account information, making travel arrangements, looking up vacation spots, or shopping. It’s all there….under a keyboard, on top of a mouse, or sliding around a touchpad.

Dawson Power makes doing business with us easy and convenient. Customer-read meters are a thing of the past for most customers. Today our meters send your reading in automatically. You can receive your bill through email. With two clicks and a log-in you can pay it online. If you want to know what we’re up to on a daily basis….ask to be our friend on Facebook!

Strangulation By Regulation

We usually try to write our own blog, but when I ran across this article...I had to share it (with permission from the author).  It is written by someone within the agricultural community and tells us how EPA plans will negatively affect every farmer and rancher in America.  Kudos Mr. Sheely! 

(As written by Ted Sheely - Oct 7 2010) ... When the Environmental Protection Agency thinks about farmers, it must have in mind the lyrics from that song by Kansas: “All we are is dust in the wind.”

That’s because the EPA wants to regulate the dust that farmers produce as they run combines through their fields and drive down gravel roads.

Federal bureaucrats seem to have forgotten that food production is a challenging business--and yes, sometimes it kicks up a bit of dust.

What’s next? Regulating backyard gardeners who grow the flowers that make the pollen that causes neighbors with allergies to sneeze?

Don’t be surprised if it comes to that. As Democratic senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas said in a recent hearing, the EPA makes a habit of threatening farmers and ranchers with “burdensome, duplicative, costly, unnecessary, or, in some cases, just plain bizarre” regulations.

Farm dust is a perfect example of federal overreach. Nobody has shown that farm dust is a public-health hazard. Judges have determined that the research is “inconclusive” but they’ve stopped short of blocking the EPA’s draconian rules.

Frustration with the EPA is bipartisan. Republican congressman Frank Lucas of Oklahoma agrees with Sen. Lincoln. He called the EPA “an agency gone wild” and warned that “if the EPA is allowed to continue down this path, the only choice for many farmers and ranchers will be to stop farming altogether.”

This is a crystal-clear example of a federal government that doesn’t have its priorities straight. Unemployment is sky-high. The challenges of joblessness are especially severe in rural America. Shouldn’t our overlords in Washington strive to get people back to work? At the very least, they shouldn’t go out of their way to make life more difficult for struggling families in these hard times.

Yet that’s what the EPA seems designed to do. My own experience with the agency is a tale of chronic frustration. It can feel as if EPA has a boot planted to my throat, trying to choke the life out of me.

"Why has an American agency decided to declare regulatory war on such a large swath of American people?” asked Gerald Simonsen of the National Sorghum Producers at a forum in Washington last week.

I know exactly what he’s talking about. Friends of mine who grow corn are worried about the future of atrazine, an important crop protection tool.

I have my own hassles with the EPA. The latest involves irrigation. Here in California, water is at a premium: We just don’t have enough of it. Federal regulations are a big part of the reason why, but that’s another story. The bottom line is that we have to use water with maximum efficiency so that we can grow the food that Americans need.

I can’t afford to lose any water, so I save every last drop--even when I’m flushing the sediment from my irrigation tape. After the water cleans out my lines, it flows into a holding pond. From there, I can reuse it.

Recycling water is an example of sustainable agriculture at work. It allows me to get the most out of limited resources.

But the EPA may make me halt this practice. It’s worried that trace amounts of herbicide and pesticide possibly will show up in my holding pond.

So instead of seeing my recycled water as a source of life for a farm that grows food in a dry land, it may treat my water as a potential source of environmental contamination.

The coming micromanagement could be severe. Previous experience with the EPA teaches me that I should anticipate a worse-case scenario--and then assume that the result will be twice as bad.

I don’t want to pollute anything--and I certainly don’t want to pollute my own farmland, where I live and work. Nobody has a greater stake in my farm’s safety than I do.

I support sensible regulations. It’s the insensible ones that drive me batty. The problem is that the EPA often refuses to exercise common sense. Its one-size-fits-all approach is bad for everyone.

The only people it helps are the regulators who seem to think that their job is to produce a bumper crop in onerous new rules, without a care for whether rural America produces the food that our country needs.

About the author:  Ted Sheely raises lettuce, cotton, tomatoes, wheat, pistachios, wine grapes and garlic on a family farm in the California San Joaquin Valley. He is a board member of Truth About Trade and Technology www.truthabouttrade.org

Talking WIND with Custer Power & NPPD

Instead of reading a blog today....listen! Public Power is your power!

Pulling a FAST One...

I sit around and wonder how things get passed inside our Senate or House of Congress - things that lack common sense -- things that don't seem right, things I do not support. Now I know...please read the FAST FACTS below.

Fast Facts:
The House budget includes a placeholder, budget reconciliation, that would slip in a cap-and-trade proposal that has yet to be defined, debated or detailed.

Budget
reconciliation is a legislative maneuver to bypass normal Senate procedures.
1. It limits debate to 20 hours when most legislation has unlimited debate.
2. It lowers the normal vote requirement from 60 votes to a simple majority in the Senate.
3. It imposes guidelines on what amendments can be offered, which is not the case for most legislation.

Based on previous climate
proposals, the likely effects of a cap-and-trade proposal are:
1. Increased energy costs, construction costs, fertilizer prices, and also higher gas and diesel prices.
2. The cost of corn production would go up by $40-80 an acre. ($3-7 billion for Nebraska Farmers)
3. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says the Environmental Protection Agency will have to spend $1.7 billion to hire 400 additional staff just to set up the program and write the rules.
4. A $3,000 per year energy tax on every American family.

Senator Johanns did something about it! Click on the link below (or the title to this article) to read the Senator's entire press release. It's worth a few minutes of your time.

THANK YOU SENATOR JOHANNS!

http://www.dawsonpower.com/blogsupport/Johanns_&_Climate_Legislation.pdf

How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?

Dawson Public Power District sold 483,114,863 kilowatt hours in 2008 to customers in our service territory. Based on a formula that is derived from what we purchase from NPPD, our (2008) carbon footprint was 394,827 tons.

The question becomes….why do I care? I used a carbon footprint calculator online (you can find them all over the internet), and my family’s annual carbon footprint is approximately 44 tons give or take a ton or two.

If a carbon tax (in the form of a literal tax or a cap and trade program) is imposed based on proposals being discussed by the federal government, we could expect to see a significant increase in our residential electric rates because utilities must collect the tax which becomes an additional cost to the end use customer.

Lots of numbers have been thrown into the ball park…$20 per ton, $50 per ton, and higher. No one has discovered the secret formula that will be enough to pinch (force) those companies who are responsible for large CO2 outputs into finding economical ways to curb the CO2.

I’ll play ball. Quick math says 44 tons (my footprint) times $20 per ton equals $880 annually added to my current electric bill and at $50 per ton, I’m screaming because I just added a $183 tax per month to my bill. BUT….we won’t be taxed individually; this tax will be socialized across the country according to the output of the generators. That means those people who conserve electricity or use energy efficient appliances will pay for those customers who don’t.

Let’s socialize the tax across Dawson PPDs average annual carbon footprint. At $20 per ton, our cost of power goes up 36% which means the kwh price at your home went from 7.27¢ to 9.0¢. At $50 per ton, which is an 89% increase in wholesale power cost to us, your kwh price went from 7.27¢ to 11.45¢. Dawson PPDs average residential customer uses about 1,347 kwh per month. That’s a difference between $97.93 per month (no tax) and $154.28 ($50 per ton tax). Your residential bill went up almost $60 per month for the same energy consumption.

We know it’s important to reduce CO2 emissions. But we also know it has to be done in a balanced manner so that our customers are not socked with electric bills made huge by a carbon tax. We want you to know what the costs COULD BE when you hear politicians throwing out numbers like $20 per ton or $50 per ton.

The numbers I use are a literal tax on carbon output by our electric generators. To use the cap and trade approach, the people who will benefit most are the traders on Wall Street – making the middle man the place to be as “offsets” become a commodity. Do we really want commodity brokers controlling our electric bills? And do we really want our utilities becoming tax collectors for the federal government?

Gwen Kautz, Customer Service Manager
Dawson Public Power District

...

SO IMPORTANT, IT'S A BOARD RESOLUTION!

Dawson Public Power District's board of directors are working hard for our customers. They are very concerned about what effect a cap and trade system will have on our rates. So much so, they plan to pass a board resolution at the April 2009 meeting.

The resolution cites why Dawson PPD feels the way they do and what could happen if Congress passes a program like this. We will be sending this resolution to all of our congressional leaders. We encourage you to contact your elected representative!

If you would like to read the resolution, please click here: http://tinyurl.com/cvmqrx

Can we learn from the mistakes of others?

Push and shove, pull and poke, up or down…will anyone get it right? Our Congressional leaders are in disagreement about CO2 legislation – and what they decide could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back when it comes to regulating carbon dioxide.

In an environment screaming recession, people won’t stand for the word “tax” especially an energy tax, as part of the solution to reduce CO2. So hide it behind the words “Cap and Trade.”

A cap-and-trade plan is a tax in disguise and thankfully a number of Democrats and Republicans are starting to see that this proposal has serious defects. Rural utility systems have tried to point out these flaws for the past year. (See Glenn English’s dialogue with America below.) Using a cap-and-trade program is inefficient and costly – and worse yet – unpredictable.

I think the hardest part is that the people who will make these decisions truly believe they have the facts in front of them. They feel like they understand the problem. What I don’t think they understand is how far reaching a cap-and-trade program can be. They willingly admit “Oh, we know it will raise electric rates a little.” But folks, it won’t be a little. It will be a lot! Your electric rates could easily double!

Europe enacted a cap and trade program years ago. It isn’t working! Read this article: http://tinyurl.com/bb3exl

Now add another small fact worth considering. Let’s say…for the sake of agreement, all Americans get in this boat and chant the mantra “Save our Planet” and find a way to reduce CO2 in a cost effective, balanced approach. China has decided it is exempt from reducing C02. They say they should not have to reduce emissions caused by goods manufactured to meet demand elsewhere (from The Washington Post-March 17 2009). Did we gain a thing?

America responded (loudly) to President Obama’s promise that if you make $250,000 or less, you will not see a tax increase…..except he left off “unless you use electricity.” We can’t afford to get this wrong.

“Lawmakers may say they have plans to rebate some people so that everyone does not suffer, but it is not possible to craft a cap and trade plan that is perfectly offset by rebates. Just because a politician promotes a plan that is “budget neutral” for government does not mean it is “budget neutral” for American families. When politicians redistribute money, there will be winners and losers. The winners will be the politically well-connected groups and the populace as a whole will lose.” (Paragraph source: Institute For Energy Research)

Gwen Kautz, Dawson Public Power District

AMERICA is headed for an electricity crisis!

Increasing demand. Rising rates. CO2 reductions. Transmission overload.

If Americans want to keep electricity safe, reliable and affordable, Congress and America's rural electric utilities must work together.

Join the 222,500 American consumers who have sent over 1,609,000 letters and emails to elected officials asking tough questions about our energy future.

Please visit www.ourenergy.coop.



Urge Congress to work with public power districts to balance the response to renewables and clean energy --and your need for affordable, reliable electricity