HELPING OUT IN THE COMMUNITY

As you may recall, for many years the local and our service contractors participated in the "Heats On" program in Baltimore City. COUNT intends to restart "Heats On" as part of our local marketing and community involvement program.

On Saturday, October 17, 2009 we are going to sponsor a Harford County "Heats On" project in conjunction with Habitat for Humanity's "Fix It Up" program.

We are looking for service tech volunteers to do minor repairs for low incoome and elderly citizens.

"Fix It Up" will supply a list of prescreened residents that are in need. Each technician will be assigned a few residential properties to service. The material needed to make the repairs will be paid for by "Fix It Up" and supplied by a local supply house.

Service techs will meet at a hotel to be determined in Edgewood and will be served a buffet breakfast before going out into the community to do good works.

Please let me know if you would like to be involved. Contact me at brianc@countprogram.org

ABC CLAIMS PROVEN UNFOUNDED

A preliminary report on ABC's claim to be the largest trainer of construction trades apprentice's in the country has been proven to be pure propaganda, as we have known all along.

According to the facts supplied by the department of labor, just using one sample for our local area, the Baltimore metro chapter of the Associated Builders and Contractors between 1990 and 2002 registered 1,848 apprentices covering all crafts.

Now here is where the rubber meets the road. Over that 12 year period 985 cancelled 500 disappeared for one reason or another and a total of 363 completed the apprenticeship. During this same period our apprenticeship school graudated over 450 plumbers and steamfitters. Now these are astonishing numbers when you consider the fact that we are just one construction trade.

Now that we have the real facts about true apprenticeship training in this country, we can truly use this information, to dispel the false and baseless information constantly given out to the public by the Associated Builders and Contractors propaganda machine.

WIND POWER

Wind power is the conversion of wind energy into a useful form, such as electricity, using wind turbines. At the end of 2008, worldwide nameplate capacity of wind-powered generators was 121.2 gigawatts (GW). Wind power produces about 1.5% of worldwide electricity use, and is growing rapidly, having doubled in the three years between 2005 and 2008. Several countries have achieved relatively high levels of wind power penetration, such as 19% of stationary electricity production in Denmark, 11% in Spain and Portugal, and 7% in Germany and the Republic of Ireland in 2008. As of May 2009, eighty countries around the world are using wind power on a commercial basis. Large-scale wind farms are typically connected to the local electric power transmission network; smaller turbines are used to provide electricity to isolated locations. Utility companies increasingly buy back surplus electricity produced by small domestic turbines. Wind energy as a power source is attractive as an alternative to fossil fuels, because it is plentiful, renewable, widely distributed, clean, and produces no greenhouse gas emissions; however, the construction of wind farms (as with other forms of power generation) is not universally welcomed due to their visual impact and other effects on the environment. Wind power is non-dispatchable, meaning that for economic operation all of the available output must be taken when it is available, and other resources, such as hydropower, and standard load management techniques must be used to match supply with demand. The intermittency of wind seldom creates problems when using wind power to supply a low proportion of total demand. Where wind is to be used for a moderate fraction of demand, additional costs for compensation of intermittency are considered to be modest. Studies of a pan European power grid, show that wind can be used to meet e.g. 70% of load, over a wide area of interconnected grids, and then the costs of electricity delivered into the consuming country are comparable to present day power costs. Wind and hydroelectric power generation have negligible fuel costs and relatively low maintenance costs; in economic terms, wind power has a low marginal cost and a high proportion of capital cost. The estimated average cost per unit incorporates the cost of construction of the turbine and transmission facilities, borrowed funds, return to investors (including cost of risk), estimated annual production, and other components, averaged over the projected useful life of the equipment, which may be in excess of twenty years. Energy cost estimates are highly dependent on these assumptions so published cost figures can differ substantially. A British Wind Energy Association report gives an average generation cost of onshore wind power of around 3.2 pence (between US 5 and 6 cents) per kWh (2005).