Lafayette Uilities System's Director Terry Huval says that only 950 LUS customers are currently without power and that all of them will have electricity by the end of today. "We plan to get everyone back today. By the end of the day we'll have no customers out." Huval adds that there are still repairs that need to be made to lines that reach individual homes. "But all customers who can receive service from us will be back on tonight. I am confident that we're going to have everybody back on today."
About 450 linemen and tree trimmers from Texas, Georgia, Ohio, North Carolina and Pennsylvania are in Lafayette, staged at Cajun Field and teamed up with LUS crews to help with the restoration efforts.
LUS has about 60,000 customers. At the height of LUS' outages during Gustav, 41 percent of LUS' customers were without power. By Monday night, half of those customers' electricity was restored.
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Is there a state website where we can find all regulated and non-regulated plants in the state? Do the merchant plants step up in a bind to help out if the regulated ones go offline?
And would the Ind please consider asking local officials if they have any plan to get some of this federal money for "hardening" of our electrical grid? It seems long past time that our corporate, municipal and co-operative utilities begin burying retail power lines in our cities where tree proximities cause conflicts. As to the distribution and transmission lines, those would probably be prohibitively expensive to bury, but more worth the focus of the linemen's efforts to fix up when a disaster happens than all these local lines.
And lastly, our state now has a 50% refundable credit against any state income tax liabilities, it is even refundable in excess of taxes owed, for any homesite or business which installs a solar electric or solar water heating system on their property (not only on the roof) up to a system price of $25,000.00, (that's a 12,500 credit!)
Would not further pursuing that effort also be prudent for state policy of distributing our electrical generation, reducing the "hub and wire" grid system we rely exclusively upon for our electricity? At present, it's a cottage industry, but seems to have potential.