By Diana Diamond
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Until solar powered cars are produced en masse and are affordable for everyone, mandating electric cars will never happen. We can use LESS gas by using a combustion engine sparingly.
I’m already using strictly electricity in my home and don’t have plans to change it.
Fiber optic internet service is a backwards move. Palo Alto’s Fiber Net is not the only solution to bringing internet to everyone who wants it. All it will do is create more competition. I’m all for competition and how it can work to the consumer’s advantage, but $40/mo is TODAY’S competitive pricing. What will it be 10 years from now? I smell a boondoggle in the barbecue pit, and it burns up fast and will need a constant supply of dollars to keep it running.
If Palo Alto REALLY wants to be innovative, try spending $500 million dollars to solve the housing crisis, instead of bringing us more of what we don’t need. Internet speed hasn’t been a thing since the early 00’s.
My first computer was an IBM with 35 mg hard drive. Yes that is MGs not GB’s. The only window operating was the one I looked out of from my desk while waiting for a page to load. I could make a pot of coffee, fry two eggs and make hashbrowns from scratch while waiting. So, while faster internet is “necessary”, from my perspective as long as I don’t have to use my landline to connect to a 256k modem, anything is an improvement.
Why Palo Alto thinks they can build a better mousetrap is beyond me. How many people had outages while we had them this summer? Even in the high desert they had no outages, because there aren’t as many squirrels (?) and the people with their hands on the red button aren’t as itchy as we are here. Our inexperience and ineptitude was showing, big time.
In other words — it ain’t broke. DON’T FIX IT.
The above non-answers reflect the same non-answers to specific questions about the proposed Fiber system.
Speaking of readiness, years of complaints about the unreliable power outage reporting system seem to have finally reached the Utility Department and City Hall and CC will start considering ta $625,000 budget item for a new and hopefully improved one.
And they ignore recent articles on practical problems NOW statewide — forget about locally — in satisfying CURRENT demand because A) California’s bidding against other Western states for supply and B) demand is NOW stressing the system so badly CA just asked all EV owners to charge their vehicles from 8AM – 2PM — which is when people are at work or at school and not have access to a charging station.
That’s before we wholesale conversions, big local spending projects to subsidize our appliance, HVAC and vehicle purchases ….
This unrealistic pipedream about going all-electric is a key element of President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill which allocates $3B towards the effort.
If he is serious and not simply talking out of his hat, Biden will need to allocate far more money for municipal research and implementation, not only for Palo Alto but for every city, township, and unincorporated area (counties) in the entire United States.
This all-electric concept will be impractical, extremely costly, and is just another overly-idealistic delusion on the part of progressives who cannot see the forest through the trees.
This is exactly the big problem, the elephant in the room, a prime example of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing, putting the cart before the horse, and any other cliche that seems appropriate.
What is the point of Palo Alto being relentlessly eco-conscious when these proposed adaptations will have minimal (aka zero) environmental impact in terms of the big picture?
Tell China, India, and other coal-burning countries to do the same…then we’ll talk.
“What is the point of Palo Alto being relentlessly eco-conscious…”
So our “leaders” and city staffers can win awards to burnish their resumes… It’s been happening for years and seems to bear little relationship to whether a project ever gets finished or ever works.
After months/years of study, it takes time for PA city officials to arrive at a concrete conclusion and by then, the scenario has most likely changed.
They are either very cautious or an incompetent group of individuals.
“So our “leaders” and city staffers can win awards to burnish their resumes… It’s been happening for years and seems to bear little relationship to whether a project ever gets finished or ever works.”
^ For what purpose? Outside of pursuing a county supervisor role or moving on to another city staff, they will never get any higher in the world of politics or municipal administration.
[Portion removed.]
Evasive answers to perfectly reasonable questions from a member of the public erode confidence in the utility agency and its ability to meet the challenges of the future.
How about: “Your questions are good ones, but we don’t yet have answers to all of them. Addressing them piecemeal might end up misleading the public because each factor impacts the others. Our report, which we hope to issue later this year, will be as comprehensive as possible and provide solid information for policy-makers and the public
. Feel free to check back on the timing of the report.”
Taint rocket science, ya know.
For the present, I think the answers provided by the CPAU spokesperson can be translated into a succinct NO. That may change over time, but for now we residents have good reason to be both wary and concerned. I think the most realistic resource on issues of this sort is Sherry Listgarten. She’s smart, straightforward, and credible. I will wait for her to say Palo Alto has reached its goal.
In the meanwhile, we will continue to wait for CPAU to take the last step so that the solar we installed can be operational! We are trying to go green but waiting months (nearly 6 now) for this last step is not the best way to get residents to encourage their friends and neighbors to invest in solar.
Diana is a realist, and Sherry is a climate change activist. Anything further said would inappropriate and against my better judgment.
An all-electric city will have its inherent vulnerabilities and until there are fail-safe systems to prevent a total blackout, count me out.
With no clear-cut master plan (other than ‘visionary’ pipedreams), the PACC should not proceed with this endeavor.
The PACC is essentially ‘out to lunch’ on many important municipal issues.
Incompetence is their trademark.
Diana, I can answer most of the questions that your City spokesperson could not. Since I live around the corner from you, I suggest we walk a couple of blocks down Cowper street to where the lines are overhead, and I can point out exactly how undersized every piece of the distribution infrastructure is. Briefly,
* primary (high voltage) lines are 4kV, need to be upgraded to 12kV, so need new insulators.
* primary wires are, to use the technical term, teensy. Need to replace with new, fatter wires to handle the loads of all-electric homes
* transformers (that step high voltage down to 120/240) are small, few, and far between. Typically there are two of 25kVA or 35kVA capacity each, per block. We’ll need one of those for every 3 or 4 all-electric homes.
* secondary (120/240V) wires along the pole lines are, like the primaries, too small, as are the drop wires to the homes. These wires are much smaller than what you are required, by the electrical code, to install from your panel to where the drop attaches.
So we need bigger insulators, bigger wires, more and bigger transformers. And we’re going to put all this stuff up on those old poles? That makes no sense, we need to build the network underground (Diana’s home and mine have underground service now.) If the city is serious about going all electric, we need a plan for this rebuild, and how to pay for it. I doubt that the $140M proposed for fiber to compete with AT&T and Comcast and Verizon will cover it, but fiber-optic networking won’t help address climate change.
Of course, the residential electric distribution infrastructure that we see is only part of the problem. Those lines are fed by “substations” that are in tur fed by the city’s main power switchyard using higher voltage lines (60kV or 115kV). Presumably they will need upgrading also.
Continuing “up the tree,” the entire city electric supply comes in on a single high voltage line along the bay; there is no backup. One plane crash and we’re in the dark,
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