This is a follow up to my post Dear generator-owning homeowners, do not invite Nick Kristof over next time there is a hurricane, regarding the complaint by NY Times columnist Nick Kristof about rich people with off-grid electricity generators:
That’s how things often work in America. Half-a-century of tax cuts focused on the wealthiest Americans leave us with third-rate public services, leading the wealthy to develop inefficient private workarounds.
Reader fmc commented about an hour ago:
The New York Times must have it’s own PRIVATE power generation system. It probably costs close to a million dollars to build and maintain, not to mention the cost of a professional electrician or two. Does this NYT writer expect his company to forego its own electrical backup solution because some people can afford one or won’t bother to plan for disaster?
Well what do you know. The NY Times Building has a massive off-grid, private, electricity generator system:
Two Caterpillar gas engine generators provide 1,400 kW of grid-independent power to serve The New York Times Data Center and other critical loads in this mid-town high rise….
The New York Times Building is a 52 story midtown high rise that opened in 2007. The Times Company owns and occupies about half of the 1.5 million square feet in this facility. They needed a highly-reliable, redundant source of power for their data center UPS and other critical loads. A CHP system was designed by WSP Flack & Kurtz with two Caterpillar 700 kW natural-gas-driven engines as the primary source of power. Diesel engines and the utility grid provide backup and redundancy for this system. If generator power is lost, a series of automated transfer switches ensure that power flow can be maintained to these critical loads at all times.
At least it’s only for back up, right? Because nothing would make Kristof angrier than inefficient off-grid, global warming producing electricity generation. Oh wait:
The generators run around the clock throughout the year to serve these loads.
How many polar bears must die so that we can read Nick Kristof’s columns even in a hurricane?
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