GMP and WCAX

I'm a little late with this one. I've been fighing the flu for five days now. But now that I can think without feeling like my head will explode I need to revisit what I saw on WCAX's "You Can Quote Me" last Sunday. The guests were Chris Dutton and Mary Powell of Green Mountain Power. Across the table were Marselies Parsons and Andy Potter of WCAX.

The discussion was about the future of energy in Vermont as we currently pay less per kilowatt hour than most of the other states around us. 80% of our power comes from Vermont Yankee at 4 cents a kilowatt hour, and Hydroquebec at 7 cents a kilowatt hour. States around us pay between like 9 and 13 cents per kilowatt hour.

The whole conversation began cordially enough with the discussion of windpower, and problems citing it in Vermont. The folks from GMP seemed pretty on the ball and big fans of green energy. They talked about their two big drivers being energy affordability and sustainability. Then Parsons came out of nowhere.

He wanted to know, since GMP was just bought by the Canadian company Gas Metro if they could use their new contacts to get Vermont cheap natural gas. For of all things a gas fired electrical plant here in Vermont. The folks from GMP responded that not really, the price of gas is what it is, if we don't want to buy it for their price someone else will. They also went further though, in that because most of the energy consumption in Vermont is in Chittenden County, a plant like Parsons was talking about would have to be sited there or close by.

Did I miss something here? Are we not running out of fossil fuels? And WCAX wants us to continue with them? Time to move on to greener pastures, thinking like this got us where we are in the first place. by the time we build this facility we are then locked into using it, whatever the price of gas skyrockets to. Is this sound thinking? WCAX was way off base on this one, I'm glad the folks at GMP possess better foresight.