In a little less than two weeks, Frontier Airlines will fly into New Castle Airport. One unbeatable fare is to Chicago Midway Airport, where a recent check of the FlyFrontier.com website revealed a price of less than $100 round trip.
With that cheap fare, you can catch former UD star Elena Delle Donne when her WNBA team, The Chicago Sky, is in town. That idea came from a posting in the new Facebook page from airport operator, the Delaware River and Bay Authority.
A look at the schedule shows a number of opportunities to catch the Sky, since Frontier offers Friday departures that allow for a long weekend in the Windy City.
Frontier, flies into Chicago Midway Airport, which is a 30-minute train ride from the Loop.
Frontier will also serve Denver, Houston, Orlando and Tampa.
Frontier has published an interesting schedule that will rotate the flights among the cities, rather than serving a hub six or seven days a week. The four flights a week from New Castle to Denver will connect with many cities out west.
Industry analysts have wondered if that strategy will work over the long term. At the same time, the low cost of operating out of Wilmington and its other area airport in New Jersey will keep fares down. A look at similar flights to Chicago O’Hare from Philadelphia has the fare at nearly $300.
The key will be building awareness within the Delaware Valley, something Frontier is doing to a modest degree already.
The potential for growth at New Castle can be seen in Mercer County, N.J.,
The airline signed a five-year lease with the airport that serves the Trenton-Princeton area. It now serves 10 cities, including four in Florida.
Frontier will suspend service for much of the fall from the New Jersey airport as runway work is completed in time to offer winter flights to Florida and ski country in Colorado.
German utility Bloom investor
German utility giant E.ON is investing in making investments in young companies with promising alternative energy approaches.
The company has invested in a German start-up that uses waste heat to generate electricity, and in Bloom Energy, the California fuel cell company that is building a plant in Newark and operates fuel cells that feed electricity into the grid in Delaware.
The investment, reportedly amounting to $95 million is significant because Bloom has never expanded beyond the U.S. Ties with the German company could open to selling fuel cells in Europe that could be produced in Newark and shipped out of the Port of Wilmington.
While, Bloom has its share of critics, (in Delaware it’s taken to task by the Caesar Rodney Institute) the company is gaining a reputation for producing reliable products. The Bloom cells at Delmarva Power substations performed without a hitch during Hurricane Sandy.
The criticism of Bloom centers on the cost of generating electricity through fuel cells.
But efforts to come up with clean coal technology can also be costly. Forbes recently took a look at the recently opened Duke Power Edwardsport coal gas plant in Indiana.
The plant will generate about 70 percent of the capacity of the proposed natural gas-powered plant in Cecil County, Md. Its final cost ended up being $3.5 billion, compared to around $700 million for the Wildcat Point plant to be operated by Old Dominion Electric Cooperative. The initial estimate for Edwardsport was about half of the final price tag.
As the Forbes contributor noted, the $3.5 billion amounted to about three and one-half times the cost of the $1 billion Bloom has spent to develop its technology. The cost of the Indiana plant is being borne by ratepayers in that state.
Delmarva Power customers pay $1 or more a month extra for the cost of the electricity from Bloom fuel cells. – Doug Rainey
