Maine Voices: ‘Flip a switch and we’re there’ … but for too long, CMP wasn’t
Maine Voices:
‘Flip a switch
and we’re there’ …
but for too long, CMP wasn’t
The October outage was made worse by the trend among utilities to cut back on staff, relying upon unreliable electronics.
POWNAL — Customers of Central Maine Power are like the bottled genie in “The Arabian Nights.” For the first thousand years, he dreamed of the riches he would bestow on his liberator; for the next thousand, he plotted the ways in which the deliverer could be tortured.
People are so thankful to have the lights back on after a week or more in the dark that they tend to forget and forgive, which does nothing to prevent such problems from occurring again after the next inevitable windstorm. The delays in power restoration after the devastating late-October storm were so unconscionable that Mainers greeted guests with “Welcome to Puerto Rico North.”
The situation was bad to begin with, because of the unusual direction that the storm’s winds took, but it was made worse by the trend among utilities to cut back on staff, relying upon unreliable electronics, such as “smart meters” and the optimistic and erroneous CMP website, while contracting out vital services. The result has been a lack of routine maintenance, which would have reduced the damage considerably. In Pownal, for example, we have not seen a maintenance or tree-trimming crew on our heavily wooded road for five years. And while there was plenty of prior warning about the storm, the company seemed totally unprepared.
In speaking with individual employees of CMP, I have received an impression of resentment over management practices, demoralization and sour mirth about the advertising slogan “Flip a switch and we’re there.”
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Comment
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Comment by arthur qwenk on December 23, 2017 at 2:44pm
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...but Flipping a Bird is What They Deserve..
Maine as Third World Country:
CMP Transmission Rate Skyrockets 19.6% Due to Wind Power
Click here to read how the Maine ratepayer has been sold down the river by the Angus King cabal.
Maine Center For Public Interest Reporting – Three Part Series: A CRITICAL LOOK AT MAINE’S WIND ACT
******** IF LINKS BELOW DON'T WORK, GOOGLE THEM*********
(excerpts) From Part 1 – On Maine’s Wind Law “Once the committee passed the wind energy bill on to the full House and Senate, lawmakers there didn’t even debate it. They passed it unanimously and with no discussion. House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree, a Democrat from North Haven, says legislators probably didn’t know how many turbines would be constructed in Maine if the law’s goals were met." . – Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting, August 2010 https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/wind-power-bandwagon-hits-bumps-in-the-road-3/From Part 2 – On Wind and Oil Yet using wind energy doesn’t lower dependence on imported foreign oil. That’s because the majority of imported oil in Maine is used for heating and transportation. And switching our dependence from foreign oil to Maine-produced electricity isn’t likely to happen very soon, says Bartlett. “Right now, people can’t switch to electric cars and heating – if they did, we’d be in trouble.” So was one of the fundamental premises of the task force false, or at least misleading?" https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/wind-swept-task-force-set-the-rules/From Part 3 – On Wind-Required New Transmission Lines Finally, the building of enormous, high-voltage transmission lines that the regional electricity system operator says are required to move substantial amounts of wind power to markets south of Maine was never even discussed by the task force – an omission that Mills said will come to haunt the state.“If you try to put 2,500 or 3,000 megawatts in northern or eastern Maine – oh, my god, try to build the transmission!” said Mills. “It’s not just the towers, it’s the lines – that’s when I begin to think that the goal is a little farfetched.” https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/flaws-in-bill-like-skating-with-dull-skates/
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Hannah Pingree on the Maine expedited wind law
Hannah Pingree - Director of Maine's Office of Innovation and the Future
"Once the committee passed the wind energy bill on to the full House and Senate, lawmakers there didn’t even debate it. They passed it unanimously and with no discussion. House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree, a Democrat from North Haven, says legislators probably didn’t know how many turbines would be constructed in Maine."
https://pinetreewatch.org/wind-power-bandwagon-hits-bumps-in-the-road-3/
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