Category Archives: Coal

Solar power is beating fracked methane like the Internet won over BITNET

Why am I so sure that I will live to see fracked methane pipelines shut down,
along with their tar sands and petroleum partners in crime?
Because I’ve seen it before, a quarter century ago,
when the Internet won over all other networks, including BITNET.

BITNET in the U.S. and Worldwide and the Internet,
in

Matrix News 4.10 October 1994.

The exponential growth of the Internet sucked users away from all the other networks.
Coal is already crashing so fast that cleaning up coal ash is the biggest issue.
Nukes are closing left and right.
“Natural” gas is still growing, but not as fast as solar and wind, which produced more new electricity than any other source in 2020.
Soon, fracked methane will peak, and then it will fall fast, just like coal did. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.

Solar, wind, batteries and other storage will continue to soar until almost all electricity comes from them.
A cleaner world, with profit for those who buy in, and lower power charges for everyone: it’s coming fast.

Vote for clean energy and help it arrive faster.

Remember FidoNet?
Probably you’ve never heard of it, and this is why.
Remember BITNET?
Maybe not, but one of its neologisms lingers on: Continue reading →

Lowndes County Bird Supper, Atlanta, GA 2019-02-13

Annually Lowndes County and its cities including Valdosta
feed quail to state legislators at the Georgia Railroad Freight Depot
in Atlanta: this is the Bird Supper.

Lowndes County Chairman Bill Slaughter, Valdosta Mayor John Gayle

Valdosta

describes the Bird Supper: Continue reading →

Solar faster, cheaper, no cooling water, no leaks, no explosions

Way back in 2014 I calculated that half the right of way acreage of the Sabal Trail fracked methane pipeline could produce just as much electricity,
cheaper, faster, taking no land, using no cooling water, risking no leaks or explosions.
Solar is even cheaper now, doubling deployed capacity every two years,
and even Duke, FPL, and Georgia Power are building solar farms everywhere.
So why do utilities persist in building more pipelines?

Net generation, United States, all sectors, monthly, U.S. EIA.

Every electric utility can read that chart from the U.S. Energy Information Agency,
which shows wind (the middle orange line) and solar (the green line coming up from the bottom) adding up to almost all of “other renewables” (the top blue line),
with nothing else growing like that.
All the pipelines rammed through regulatorially captured agencies
don’t come close Continue reading →

A Naive Projection of the Growth of the Internet

Just as

four years ago I projected solar growth ten years ahead,
a quarter century ago I projected Internet growth ten years into the future:

Graph:

A Naive Projection of the Growth of the Internet,
John S. Quarterman, Matrix News 2.2, MIDS, February 1992.

From 7.7 million Internet users in 1992, I projected the exponential
growth of the previous few years ahead a decade, to about
3.8 billion people in 2002.

How close was that estimate? Continue reading →

The shift has come: GE, Siemens massive job losses as fossil fuels crash and the sun rises

The carbon bubble is bursting,
as jobs fly from some of the biggest companies in the world,
because solar and wind power are taking over right now.
It’s too late to bet on the wrong nuclear horse
or the wrong pipelnie snake.
Get out of fossil fuels now: the sun is rising.

Tiffany Hsu and Clifford Krauss,
New York Times, 7 December 2017,

G.E. Cuts Jobs as It Navigates a Shifting Energy Market,

General Electric, whose new leadership is moving to eliminate bloat
and grapple with the fallout from earlier, ill-timed decisions, is
taking drastic steps to keep pace with seismic shifts in the global
energy industry.

Brandon Kochkodin, Bloomberg, 7 December 2017,
GE Ranks First in 2017 Downsizing After 12,000 More Job Cuts.

The company said on Thursday that it would cut 12,000 jobs in its
power division, reducing the size of the unit’s work force by 18
percent as part of a push to compete with international rivals in a
saturated natural gas market, adjust to “softening” in
the oil and gas sectors and stay abreast of the growing demand for
renewable energy.

Solar and wind energy technology is increasingly being deployed Continue reading →

No coal ash on a dozen years of DSSWA agendas (but Brooks County Landfill)

In agendas for the governmental group which supposedly has oversight of the landfill in Lowndes County, Georgia,
there is no mention at all of coal or coal ash.
Thanks to Julia Shewchuck of SGRC, those agendas
for the Deep South Solid Waste Authority (DSSWA)
are on the LAKE website.

Back in 2006 the proposed
Brooks County Landfill
is on the
the proposed April 19, 2006 agenda,
and

the June 21, 2006 agenda
said there was
a public hearing June 29, 2006.
An update was on the
October 18, 2016 agenda.

2007 starts with one meeting with no mention of the landfill,
but the April 18, 2007 meeting has
“5. Discussion of Onyx/Langdale Proposed Land Swap”.
I don’t see any further mention of the Brooks County landfill
after that, and apparently it never happened.

Curiously, these mentions of the Brooks County Landfill on the DSSWA agenda
are all months after these VDT stories: Continue reading →

Big Bets keep getting worse for Southern Company

OSHA certified a “continuing pattern of retaliatory treatment”
at Kemper “clean” Coal after an employee
alerted Southern Company of alleged fraud: SO fired him, refused to hire him back and now he’s suing.
Plant “new nukes” Vogtle also had
impossible projections from the start and is even later and more overbudget,
while anybody from GA-PSC to Georgia EMCs to the Florida PSC
or even PowerSouth in Alabama could bring it down.
Somebody put Plant Vogtle out of its misery so we can get on with solar power
in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and everywhere else.

Two new cooling towers and construction cranes mark the work sites for nuclear reactors 3 and 4 at Plant Vogtle in east Georgia. The project is currently $3.6 billion over budget and almost four years behind the original schedule. JOHNNY EDWARDS / JREDWARDS@AJC.COM, in
Plant Vogtle: Georgia’s nuclear ‘renaissance’ now a financial quagmire by Russell Grantham and Johnny Edwards, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 19 May 2017.

Kemper “clean” Coal

Doyle LLP, PRNewswire, 8 August 2017,

Whistleblower in Kemper Project Sues Southern Company and CEO:
OSHA ruled former company engineer faced “continuing pattern of
retaliatory treatment” Continue reading →

Horses to automobiles in NYC: 13 years

This is how fast energy sources can change:
from all horses but one automobile in the 1900 New York Easter Parade
to all automobiles but one horse in the 1913 Easter Parade.

Source: U.S. National Archives

The automobile above is easier to spot than the horse below, 13 years later. Continue reading →

The real worst and best cases of climate change

†What do you want? The planet Venus? The current degraded Earth? Or a better world we know how to create?

†Joel Pett, Lexington Herald Leader, 18 March 2012,
The cartoon seen ’round the world

Mostly I post about solar and wind power winning, which is what I think is happening.
But sometimes it’s worth a reminder of what could happen if we do nothing about
climate change, and I posted on my facebook page a story about that.
Which actually didn’t go far enough to the real worst case.
Nonetheless, that story has been attacked by numerous parties of all political
and scientific and unscientific stripes for being too doom and gloom.
Yet none of the attackers bothered to mention a best case beyond
“the same world we have now”.
I have news for you: the world we have now is an ecological catastrophe,
and we can do a lot better.
So here’s the real worst case,
the current case, which is far from the best of
all possible worlds,
and the real best case, as I see it.
Plus
what we can do to head for the best case.

First, the story I posted:
David Wallace-Wells, New York Magazine, 9 July 2017,

The Uninhabitable Earth:
Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change
could wreak — sooner than you think.
Notice that word “could”, which a lot of his critics seem to have ignored.
He didn’t say “will”, and he clearly labeled what he was presenting
as worst case scenarios.

In case anybody thinks he was making any of that stuff up,
Wallace-Wells has also linked to an annotated version
with footnotes for every substantial assertion.
The annotated version notes at the top: Continue reading →

Video: Solar panels, heck yeah! –Tom Fanning, CEO, at SO stockholder meeting 2017-05-24

Tom Fanning, our genial CEO host,
said some things I’ve never heard him say before like
Southern Company is
“pivoting towards wind”
and SO’s board soon has to decide whether to go forward with Plant Vogtle
“or not” probably by August.
Fanning gets the

first and

last word in this blog post,
plus a complete transcript of what
I asked and
Tom Fanning’s response,
along with summaries of the other questions and answers.

Please hear me!
I think renewables are exceedingly important in the future.

— Tom Fanning, CEO, Southern Company

In SO’s own

meeting video
of the

25 May 2017 Stockholder Meeting,
you can see
much praise about solar power and wind and R&D and a smart grid,
along with stockholders wondering: Continue reading →

On the LAKE front

Citizen dialog for transparent process by the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange