Free Republic

A New York utility plans to approve a wind farm off eastern Long Island that it says would be the nation’s largest offshore wind energy project built to date. The project would be the first phase of a more ambitious effort to construct hundreds of electricity-producing turbines in the Atlantic Ocean in the coming years. The announcement that the Long Island Power Authority plans to approve a proposed 90-megawatt, 15-turbine wind farm in U.S. waters east of Montauk at a meeting next week was greeted enthusiastically by energy experts, elected officials and environmentalists. […] The U.S. lags behind Europe and...

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, once considered a rising star Democrat, is facing a storm of criticism over the dismal performance of the state-owned electrical utility, Long Island Power Authority, in the wake of Superstorm Sandy. Even today, over ten thousand Long Islanders remain without power. The danger signs were obvious well before Sandy hit. The New York Post wrote: ***** A state-authorized independent analysis undertaken after Hurricane Irene last year found LIPA to be an outdated, barely competent organization. The agency had ignored a 2006 recommendation that it update its management system, which runs on an obsolete 25-year-old computer...

My company is contemplating the installation of a 1.2 MW solar photovoltaic (PV) generation solar panel project on the roof of our facility. We are located on Long Island and are powered by LIPA. LIPA has a new green initiative program called CLEAN. LIPA's CLEAN Solar Initiative will pay customers $0.22/kWh for PV plants between 50 kW and 20 MW under 20-year contracts. LIPA will begin accepting applications under the program on July 16th, 2012. The United States experiments with feed-in tariffs at the local level. A number of U.S utilities, municipalities and states have approved feed-in tariffs, however such...

The controversial Cross Sound Cable is expected to powered up for the first time later today following last night's blackout. Rita Bowlby, spokeswoman for Cross Sound Cable Company, told News Channel 8 the company received an emergency order from the Department of Energy last night to operate the power cable. Bowlby says the cable will be turned on in a matter of hours "or less." In a news release, the DOE said "Activation of this 330 megawatt cable will help stabilize voltage between the two states and enable electricity to flow quickly when the generation system is operable, reducing the...

This month, like every month, Kip Kohn paid the Long Island Power Authority bill for his Oakdale sporting goods store. And like most months, he stuffed a plain, brown envelope with the bill, a check and a wad of LIPA newspaper ads on which he had scrawled "Stop wasting our money!" And, as usual, he completed the package by printing "LIPA sucks" on the front of the bulky envelope. Everything was normal until Tuesday night, when a Nassau County police detective called Kohn at his Central Islip home and asked him to appear at the Eighth Precinct station house the...