Enormous fuel cell power plant coming to Milford

Enormous by fuel cell standards, anyways. This 9 megawatt plant is estimated to cost $35 million ($3900/kW) and will be fueled by natural gas. The plant's efficiency is expected to be 60%, about the same as a modern combined cycle natural gas plant (~$600/kW).

While this is considered a huge fuel cell installation, it will provide a relatively small amount of electricity -- about 2% of the capacity of the mid-sized 455MW New Haven Harbor Station power plant.

Another choice for commercial electric customers

Welcome to the party, Gexa. What is that name, Texan or something?

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that CT customers now have more choices for electricity providers than we have ever had since deregulation. Anyone care to disagree? Check out the list here. I wouldn't really call any of these options "cheap", but at least we have competition. Now get out there and compete!

Oh yeah, don't forget to sign up for our clean options here or here.

Buy electricity ... on Ebay???

Put in your bid now for 1,000 KW-h of electricity. Current bid is (as of press time) $167, or 16.7 cents per kilowatt-hour. Please not that the UI standard offer is now 12.5. This covers only generation, not distribution, transmission, taxes or any of the other dozen charges on your bill.

Note that they are not selling a "megawatt", as advertised, but a "megawatt-hour". Megawatt is a measure of power and megawatt-hour is energy.

Fueling our Grid

Click the image to enlarge

	CT	NE
Nuke	47%	29%
NG	30%	41%
Coal	13%	14%
Oil	4%	5%
Renewables	2%	5%
Other (MSW)	2%	1%
Hydro	1%	6%

Someone was wondering what fuels are used to produce electricity in our region. Here is the most recent summary based on year-to-date data from the EIA. Actually, power coming on to our grid also comes from sources in NY, Canada and other regions not included in these numbers, but this gives the general idea.

New choice for electric provider

A Milford, CT company, "Public Power & Utility", is now offering competitive rates to residential and commercial electric customers. They are charging 10.5 cents/KWh compared to UI's current rate of 12.4. Click here to read more about it and click here for a complete list of providers.

Agro school goes solar

Common Ground High School, an agricultural-themed magnet school in New Haven, has launched a new solar energy curriculum. The curriculum will include educating teachers from all over the Connecticut. In conjunction with this, they have had a 2KW PV solar system installed on the premises. Click here to read more.

Energy investment priorities

I typically try to keep things local here, but I thought this was a pretty interesting graph. Really puts our national priorities into perspective.