That’s a really odd take. If I had to point at the most egregious and consistently active corruption I’d say it’s the relationship between a few dozen NGOs that elevate members of our legislature into office and then write the bills that those legislators then push into law. Second to that, the local media outlets who play softball with said NGO sponsored legislation to help keep it out of public scrutiny by not drawing attention to any of the details knowing full well there’d be a mass public revolt if people knew what was being discussed and implemented behind closed doors.

Town business is generally out in the open for anyone who cares enough to find out. In comparison, none of us get to hear the discussions at these NGOs while they draft policy in private for their sponsored legislators to push into law. We only get to hear the PR campaign version with all of the underlying goals and long term intentions watered down for public consumption.

You’re right, they should be attending selectboard meetings whenever possible too. Ideally volunteering for positions in town, and serving on the fire department or rescue squad as well.

Then they would actually know what’s going on and actually be able to weigh in appropriately as someone with skin in the game.

They’d also likely be busy enough in their world as it exists locally to not be wholly consumed mentally by the problems of the world outside their town.

I think it’s the best system possible for our rural communities, and that those who take issue with the system and traditions have expectations and priorities that are in some ways incompatible with living in a rural area where every aspect of local government and services rely almost entirely on volunteer labor and continual community engagement.

If you can’t make it for a few hours once a year to debate/discuss issues, and don’t want to look your neighbor in the eye while you cast a vote that could be for example financially devastating to their interests or raise taxes to the point they can’t afford the land that’s been in their family for 6 generations, then you probably also aren’t volunteering on the local fire department, mowing the athletic fields or serving on any local boards to actually implement the issues you’re voting on.

Many of the people demanding a switch to ballots just want to swoop in, vote based on a superficial understanding of town business while applying a heavy lens of the national (un)civil discourse and pop culture and swoop out not unlike how our national political system works. That’s simply not workable for small town life. Those people lack even a basic understanding of local history or dynamics and additionally usually have no respect and often times hold significant contempt for the people who actually dedicate significant chunks of their lives into the town on a volunteer basis.

Go to town meeting. Be engaged enough to know what you’re even voting on. Join your local volunteer fire department or rescue squad and raise your kids in a way that they learn the necessary values and life skills to do the same. Volunteer to mow the cemetery and athletic fields. Push back vigorously against those who try to inject the national discourse into our small town way of life.

That’s wonderful. A $40+ million dollar installation, being built in response to a state mandate to build battery storage.

The installation can supply power to a small area for between 3 to 10 hours and then becomes entirely useless once discharged.

Remove the political constraints and I bet the ROI on a gas turbine is much better.

The cost savings described in that article compare the cost of covering peaks above our contractually agreed capacity from HydroQuebec with Powerwalls versus needing to purchase the difference at the variable market rates from ISONE when they’re at their absolute highest due to demand.

They are not comparing against the cost of covering that shortfall with local GMP owned gas or even fuel oil fired peakers.

Of course, a site focusing on green energy isn’t going to make that type of comparison in a situation where fossil fuels might provide a cheaper solution.

Which is also incredibly expensive to install, requires eventual replacement of the most expensive component (the battery), and is finite in capacity. It would be cheaper to install a few gas turbine peaker plants around the state in locations where there is natural gas pipeline infrastructure than to install thousands of home batteries to achieve the same peak demand management results.

It’s almost like all that money being put into residential solar, grid scale solar and battery storage might be better spent building more generation capacity that’s dispatchable on demand. I don’t really care if they have to burn the cutest puppies that ever lived by the rail car load for fuel if it’s cheaper than what we’re doing now.

Keep in mind what you consider fair is also not really all that fair to other rate payers.

On those sunny days when demand isn’t high on the regional grid, the going bulk rates are extremely low, very small fractions of a cent per kwh but net metering forces the utilities to pass up on that deal and instead buy power back from you at close to retail rates.

Much of the time the going market price for a kwh is far less than they’re paying you, but any time your panels are producing, they can’t reject that power and source the cheapest kwh available.

It’s unfortunate because GMPs rates are more than double those in many parts of the country. If they want to continue lobbying for forced electrification, they should be working on getting rates somewhere between 1/2 and 1/4 what they currently are.

How could I have forgotten about Gruber and all that controversy. Looks like my memory of the financial aspects was charitably optimistic and the reality was even worse.

It’s been many years since I looked at the numbers for the system that was proposed, but my hazy recollection was that they were going to need something close to a 10% payroll tax, plus a bunch of other budgetary funds from other sources and even then it was only feasible to provide coverage that was equivalent to the 80% AV “gold” plans being offered on the health insurance exchange. Meaning people were still going to be on the hook for 20% of the cost of their care until a pretty high deductible was reached.

People at the time were mistakenly assuming it would be like the NHS in the UK or something and be an all you can eat, completely free buffet of healthcare. For many the payroll tax would have been more than what their contribution for employer sponsored benefits were, for slightly worse coverage.

The CCI test you attached is very unlikely to be Fidium, as even their lowest speed 50mbps plan is fully symmetrical and will nearly 100% of the time test at the fully 50/50. That has to be their DSL offering, and in a particularly lucky location to be getting such a decent speed over copper in VT.

Once you get to the gig sometimes it’ll show as 900/800 or some minor variation on a computer wired to their CPE. On wifi all bets are off.

I actually only recently realized that most people actually think that NASA itself built and operated the hardware that put man on the moon or built the space shuttle, satellites etc.

NASA had only ever operated as sort of a loosely hands on project manager. The actual engineering, production and operation has always been essentially handled by the corporate military industrial complex.

IBM, ITT, Western Electric, Remington Rand, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and all the rest put things into space and landed on the moon. NASA comes up with some napkin bid specs, and coordinates delivery and writes the checks.

Buderus makes a fine machine.

Agreed, condensing boilers are flimsy, maintenance intensive parts consuming messes most of the time. The efficiency gain is more often than not outweighed by the ridiculously short service life and frequent downtime/costly repairs.

Same goes for inverter driven mini splits, and gas forced air furnaces. Designed for efficiency, and to fail just outside the warranty period.

Interestingly enough, the only exception to this is fuel oil.

Oil furnaces and boilers really haven’t suffered the cost reduction engineering the way gas appliances have. You can easily still get 30-40 years of operation out of them as long as someone is cleaning them every year or two and keeping things dialed in, not frequently running out of fuel which can get gunk in the nozzle and cause sooting etc.

Recovering some raw materials from a usable item is not recycling. How hard is that to understand. Recycling when conducted properly has a primary goal of salvage and return to use for the original intended purpose of an item. Recovery of raw material is the absolute worst case last resort in recycling.

Shredding up a bunch of 5 year old computers that are the product of a considerable amount of human labor, energy, raw materials and transportation activities when they still have years of serviceable life remaining is not recycling, and it is not sustainable. Full stop.

Any circumstances making that a common outcome need to be challenged and mitigated. Both on the part of manufacturers and the original end users or purchasing institutions.

Sounds like a reason to require removable storage devices if total destruction of the storage media is the only acceptable means of security, or lose any sustainability accreditation as a manufacturer.

Enterprises requiring this as a condition of their device disposal policy should also lose any sustainability awards or accreditations as well because they aren’t really recycling anything, recovering a few grams of precious metal and some plastic that isn’t even usable to produce anything of quality is only very marginally better than throwing everything in a landfill.

Apple created the software mechanism in question, where it didn’t exist before and changed the status quo from one where it was trivial to salvage anything physically intact entering the waste stream for reuse to one where it was in many or most cases impossible.

That’s not even getting into Apples lobbying efforts at the individual state level to implement “sustainable “ ewaste disposal programs where the primary focus was physically destroying any usable hardware as quickly as reasonably possible after being discarded.

No, they cannot. Sometimes they can even wipe the storage using the recovery boot menu, but as soon as the device contacts apple when connected to a network it’s going to prompt for iCloud credentials and not allow any further use without them.

You clearly have zero experience in this area, this is and has been a very well known issue with iPads entering the waste stream for a very long time, and everyone involved knew it was coming to computers as well when Apple announced the T2 chip and how it was going to be integrated with activation lock.

Apple already has a database matching devices with their iCloud email addresses that were used, that’s why it’s possible to log in and release the lock on your own devices.

All they need to do is have a web portal where a recycler can submit a list of serials for hardware they have, push an email or notification to the registered account and check if it’s been marked stolen using FindMy and allow an unlock and wipe if everything checks out after a set period of time.

That’s all well and good, but doesn’t change the fact that these perfectly reusable devices are already accumulating and will continue to accumulate in ever increasing mass quantities at recycling depots across the country where there is no possibility to do the ecologically and socially responsible thing and ensure they get a second life as a usable device for someone who isn’t suited to buy brand new.

Rendering mass quantities of usable equipment as at best a token fraction of its raw input material cannot be allowed to be classified as a sustainable practice. Any sustainability labels or accreditations need to be removed from both Apple and any enterprises that demand destruction of depreciated assets if that is to continue. Cut the greenwashing, call it what it is.

You clearly aren’t familiar with how much perfectly usable material people (both individuals and organizations) discard at recycling depots that aren’t going to go through the hassle of even a single mouse click for something that in their mind is trash and they’re throwing in the garbage. Working LCD televisions, 5 year old computers, appliances replaced because they didn’t like the color anymore etc.

In the past when drives were removable these places would typically pull them and either destroy and replace or run the disks through automated DOD multi pass erasing machines, do a fresh install of the OS and throw it out in the thrift store portion of the depot for $50-100 to cover the overhead of doing so.

Occasionally you’d get the odd stray machine with a bios lock that could be a parts donor for one of the other pallet load of the same machine that got banged up in the process of being thrown away, no big deal.

Now it’s getting to be a majority of devices coming in that are encumbered by some sort of lock, cloud service login or similar (like those sonos speakers that the company encouraged people to software brick and drop off at their local recycler). This is not unintentional on the part of the manufacturers.

If keyless but otherwise drivable cars were piling up in storage lots the way apple devices have been since iPads started featuring activation lock have been at recycling depots, they wouldn’t start shredding all the cars up, they’d be changing out the ignition tumblers and coding new keys.

There’s no reason a server side mechanism at Apple can’t be put in place to release activation lock after notifying the registered email address and a waiting period passing with no response. As part of such an unlock, a secure erase of the storage would mean there are no security implications and usable hardware would be diverted from becoming needless waste.

Different issue.

Mini splits just generally aren’t designed to be overly serviceable from the start. Unlike a traditional central AC system where the components are usually fairly universal and can be mixed and matched, they’re generally proprietary and model specific with the model lines refreshing every year or two with little to no parts compatibility between refresh cycles.

Lots of small plastic parts and clips, delicate mechanisms with tight tolerances and electronics that fail with the slightest power surge or just from normal use due to being designed so tightly to spec for efficiency.

This is a pretty common situation sadly.

The parts are model specific, and models refresh very frequently so the parts for a given model are only produced for a very short time.

Additionally heat pumps regardless of manufacturer aren’t really designed with repair in mind to begin with. A lot of mechanical techs consider them to basically be similar to a very expensive disposable window unit. Even if you do all the preventative maintenance (which is quite involved, better hope the indoor heads are placed so they can be fully disassembled yearly) they’re unlikely to make it to 15 years of service life. Many people see less than 5 before they’re beyond economical repair.

That map shows generation sources within the state, but Vermont produces a very small percentage of the power consumed here so it’s extremely misleading.

All electricity consumed in Vermont is pulled from the common pool that is the broader ISO New England grid. Similarly all electricity produced here, or brought in on interconnections with Canada is injected into that same regional grid. It’s one large pool of energy that is traded on a commodity market where real time prices paid by VT utilities for what they pull off the system for their customers are determined by supply and demand on that broader grid and trading market.

The finances of utilities like GMP and VELCO are absolutely affected by fluctuations and shortages in natural gas because natural gas makes up about 50% of the baseload for ISO NE. They can buffer for very short term events without having to pass the costs on in terms of rate increases, but anything substantial will require emergency rate adjustments that would almost certainly be approved by the VT utility regulators.