Letter to the editor by Jed Horovitz
The call for energy independence has been made by every single American President (Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter) for the last 30 years. Current events in the oil producing states of the Middle East make them all sound like prophets. So regardless of your political orientation, it is time to heed the call for energy independence. Global warming and all humanitarian concerns aside, our own lifestyles and prosperity demand it.
We’ve all learned about the myriad small ways in which we can use less energy, but we still need power for our ovens, refrigerators, computers, cars and media centers. This energy has to come from somewhere.
For nearly 100 years, energy policy in this country has been based on scale. Large companies digging, drilling, damming, burning, ‘fissioning’, transmitting, piping, trucking and pumping. The benefits of this large scale effort are obvious. We have the most available and cheapest energy in the world…for now. The downside is that this worldwide scale is not conducive to the changes needed to re-establish our energy independence. Big companies, like big ships, don’t change direction quickly.
The good news is that new technologies are creating alternatives for us. The same technological revolution that has enabled telecommuting, allows us each to create energy where we use it and to share it over the grid created by the large scale public and private investments of the last 100 years. We are lucky that the state has done a fine job of encouraging the development of various alternative energy initiatives that foster energy independence here in our state. Happily the private sector, made up of individuals and local enterprises, is ready to run with this opportunity. Hundreds of solar, wind and bio fuel installations have been built here in the last few years. We could have thousands or tens of thousands. Many people in Haddonfield have money to invest. Thanks to state and federal incentives, it makes a lot more economic sense to invest your money in local power generation than with Wall Street.
The only thing holding back exponential growth in local energy generation and actual energy independence is the reluctance of the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities to fully implement the well thought out (for once) laws created by our legislators. It is obvious why private monopolies don’t want us to be energy independent from them. It is less clear why our own state government, especially in these cash strapped times would want to keep us shackled to the Middle East and coal fired plants with a chain whose links have names like Atlantic City Electric.
Under the state BPU’s current, arbitrary (as in unsupported by argument) interpretation of our state laws, local power generation is being limited to the amount used at the place the power is created. Counter our national, state and personal goals this severely limits our ability to achieve energy independence but it does extend the monopoly of the grid owners into power generation. Unfortunately, the utilities and the BPU are one single ship and as I said, turning really big ships is not easy.
Individuals and businesses in Haddonfield could contribute to energy independence if the state Board of Public Utilities would simply follow the lead of the elected representatives of the people.
