Record Shattered: Con Edison: NY Customers Used 1 Trillion Watts Of Power During Heat Wave

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con-edisonCon Edison says New York customers used not a million, not a billion, but a trillion watt hours of electricity during last week’s brutal four-day heat wave.

That’s one-sixth of what Vermont generally uses in a year.

The all-time peak record for energy use was broken at 4 p.m. Friday, clocking in at 13,189 megawatts. That was 48 megawatts higher than the previous record set in August of 2006.

About 80,000 customers lost power in scattered outages during that sticky stretch. The utility reduced voltage in 69 city neighborhoods to protect the supply.

Large customers got paid to cut back on power, which the utility credits with reducing demand by about 500 megawatts during peak hours on Thursday and Friday.

{1010 WINS/Matzav.com Newscenter}


4 COMMENTS

  1. More people using more appliances drawing more power should not be surprising. What should be surprising – and disturbing – is the complete lack of energy policy of the United States – for the past 20+ years.

  2. People have become terribly spoiled. During hot weather, far too many homes, businesses and shuls are kept unreasonably– even uncomfortably–cool. I’ve also seen many people use more lights than they need, including keeping lights on in a room that is sufficiently lit by natural daylight.

    Fans, especially _ceiling_ fans, can make less air-conditioning go farther. There are also many nights when the air is cool enough that a fan alone can be sufficient. Using a fan on exhaust, to blow the hot air out of a space, is another option that can often be highly efficient and which seems to be under-utilized in this age of a/c-centric age.

    Mayor Bloomberg (despicable as I find him in general) was absolutely correct when he said that during a heat wave, when energy consumption is at peak demand, people should set their thermostat to 79 degrees (F) and added that while that may be uncomforable for some,
    “not having electricity would be a lot more uncomfortable.”

    In the larger picture and longer term, excessive energy consumption does no one any good — except the fossil-fuel industry. Global warming is a serious threat that is already wreaking havoc in a number ways. On that there is no real dispute; it is the overwhelming, nearly-unanimous consensus of the scientific community. But even if you insist on being deceived by the disinformation spread by lubricious, industry-backed propagandists and refuse to believe the threat of global warming is real, there is still plenty of reason to be concerned: The pollution caused by the processing and burning of fossil fuels– to say nothing of all that the production of nuclear energy is fraught with– has long been incontroverably linked to any number of cancers and other serious and deadly threats to human and environmental health (not that the two can actually be separated).

  3. Apropos global warming, just one book I recommend off-hand:

    Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

    by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway
    Bloomsbury Press. 2010.
    ISBN 978-1-59691-610-4

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