Energy

Rural electricifican

The other day driving past the hunting camps and rural homes up on the dirt roads around Gas Springs NY, I was a bit surprised how far the electric lines extended into this area to very remote farms and camps on dirt roads. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised – rural electricifican has extended to nearly all corners of our country – but it seems like in an era of solar power, batteries and inverters, to be incredibly expensive and wasteful to have run lines all that way out there.

Power Lines

While rural electricifican efforts got underway in the 1930s, many of the more remote farms and homes didn’t get electricity until the 1950s or even 1960s. It seems hard to imagine a modern dairy without electricity to run the pumps or coolers but many other farms certainly did. They had all kinds of belt driven equipment that often ran off of Blackstone and other primitive motors. The modern tractor PTO had yet to be standardized.

World sets all-time high temperature record 2 days in a row

‘Unprecedented and terrifying’: World sets all-time high temperature record 2 days in a row

The Earth’s average temperature reached an all-time high on Monday, and then again on Tuesday, in what is shaping up to be a year of record-breaking heat.

Monday’s global average temperature of 62.62 degrees Fahrenheit was exceeded Tuesday when it reached 62.92?F, according to the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute.

Bill McGuire, professor emeritus of geophysical climate hazards at University College London, called the back-to-back records “totally unprecedented and terrifying.”

High Voltage Power Lines in NYS

This interactive map shows the high-voltage lines in New York State. It is a different presentation of the map shown in EIA State Energy Profile. Data Source: Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data (HIFLD) and Energy Information Agency. Electric Substations: https://hifld-geoplatform.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/electric-substations Electric Transmission Lines: https://hifld-geoplatform.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/electric-power-transmission-lines