It’s like this.

You have squabbled, cajoled, argued, conceded, bargained, then sealed the deal and driven your new car home….

While it sits parked in the driveway you sit in the comfort of your living room, pull out all your financial papers, pull out the car handbook, and ask yourself this question: ‘Ok, what did I just buy?”

And here is what the preliminary read through tells us:

A.) We got 200 MW instead of 300 MW.

B.) We are going to inflate REC credits three and a half times.

C ) We may get power started by 2012 instead of 2014 or 2015.

D.) Delmarva will receive roughly 20% of its electricity from the offshore wind farm instead of 30%.

E.) Somewhere close to 60 turbines will be initially built 11.5 miles off Rehoboth.

F.) Eventually the farm is expected to grow to 600 MWh, selling to outside bidders.

G.) The lower amount means a backup Connectiv generator is no longer needed in Sussex County.

H.) The savings from Bluewater Wind will be thinly spread to all of Delmarva Power’s customers.

I.) The outstanding court cases will be dropped with the signing and approval of this agreement.

J.) Rick Jensen should stick to talk radio and no longer become involved with live broadcasts.

Analysis:

A.) We will pay much more for our power than we would have paid with the current 300 MWh deal.

B.) The 3.5 REC deal means there will be less pollution taken out of the picture than with the 1 for 1 deal.

C.) Assuming a modest rise in fossil fuel cost, the earlier start date will begin saving money for Delawareans two years earlier.

D,) Twenty percent of our electrical bill will stay steady and never rise. 80% will.

E.) If Delmarva keeps the onshore wind deals it has signed, roughly 20% or our power will be onshore, 20% will be off shore, and 60% will come from other……maybe even from the 84% of Bluewater Wind being sold on the market…

F.) With no Connectiv generator being built, the two wind proposals will result in a decrease of the amount of carbon being burned for Delaware’s power…

G.) Because 200MWh will be spread thin among all Delmarva’s customers, instead of 300MWh being spread just among Delaware’s SOS customers, the savings received by each SOS customer, will be watered down considerably.

H.) Because of no outstanding court case, the process towards building can begin faster.

I.) As our automotive jobs leave the state, wind power jobs should be entering the state.

Editorial:

With the new 200MWH deal, Delmarva SOS customers, who were on the verge of having the 300 MWh deal slip past the Senate (there were enough vote) will now have to settle for higher electric bills. Meanwhile Delmarva gets higher profits from selling higher costing energy and collecting a higher percentage of that high cost for itself…. So we will see not relief in our bills as we would have with the additional 100 MWh higher number.. Also, more fossil fuels must now be bought by Delmarva than would have been bought with the 300 MWh plan before. We are proposing to give Delmarva Power permission (by inflating the REC’s) to still burn more fossil fuels yet pay only 1/3 the amount we would have gotten for the privilege…. Whereas House Bill 6 was an attempt to assuage Delawareans fears of paying too much for energy, this deal does just the opposite.

Delaware is a small state. Therefore I guess it cannot be blamed for thinking rather small at times… Somethings never change. In our state’s past, back in the 1830’s, a group of investors got together to build one of the first railroads in this new nation…. (new technology, untested, higher cost to consumers, etc., etc) Afraid to think big with new technology, they built a railroad from New Castle to Frenchtown… Of course at that time,…travel came down from Philadelphia, crossed the land bridge to the Chesapeake, and sailed on to Baltimore… It made perfect sense at the time to build a railroad between those two points….

But it failed ten years later because it did not think big enough.. Someone else did and they chose to build a railroad directly from Philadelphia to Baltimore, and the ship traffic supplying traffic the Delaware railroad,… dried up. And that is why you never hear of the New Castle-Frenchtown Railroad today. Were it them who expanded earlier, they could have taken over the role taken by the Pennsylvanian Railroad and grown accordingly…. But.. they thought too small.

In the end, however, moving forward IS a good idea. A deal in the works is better than theory on paper. Those of us who really understood just how much money Delmarva’s customers would save on their electric bills with Bluewater Wind, are disappointed in the results. Of course anytime you get close to victory, one cannot help but dream of what life will be like once the battle is over… In this case is could have led to a return to $100 monthly electric bills again. Wouldn’t that have been nice?

But when all is said and done, in the end what really matters is NOT whether this deal is better for Bluewater Wind, or for Delmarva Power. NOR is it whether this deal is better for us…(it isn’t)

No….what really matters on the global historical scale of the universe……is whether this is a “better deal for Delaware”……And in my humble opinion, if we get a hub started in Delaware, if we get Wilmington’s port bustling again, if we get new jobs opening up for young people in this area, if we get tourists at our beaches curious to see the future of energy in their lifetimes, if we one day get a 600 MWh farm spinning its rotors off Rehoboth, even if most of the power is going somewhere else, carried by the new MAPP lines being built, if we can get some coal plants shut down, if we can phase out our Cancer Capitol of the World reputation, if we can one day pay less for our power than we do now,

Then this little starter deal is a good thing for Delaware.

And despite misgivings I might have after considering all the numerous ripple effects that this decision will have, (which otherwise would still hang in limbo until the Georgetown Court could finally decide in Delaware’s citizens favor), I weigh in and say it’s time we go forward with it.

Perhaps next year we will have enough votes to re-regulate Delmarva Power again. Regulated states pay much less for their electricity than unregulated states……quite a bit less…………

🙂