Same old
agenda tonight at the Industrial Authority (only the dates
change each month).
It’s now buried
three levels down on their website,
but at least
they’ve started archiving old agendas.
Still no minutes, though,
going on two years since
the VDT publicly exposed VLCIA’s expensive price tag for old minutes.
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Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial AuthorityContinue reading
Agenda
Tuesday, February 19, 2013 5:30 p.m.
Industrial Authority Conference Room
2110 N. Patterson Street
A Georgia Senate committee needs to take it up
a bill that would greatly ease financing
solar power for your housetop or business roof.
Sen. Jack Murphy is the chair, and you can contact him today.
GA SB 51, The Georgia Cogeneration and Distributed Generation Act, was read to the Senate 16 January 2013 and referred to the Committee on Regulated Industries and Utilities. Here’s contact information for the Chair of that Committee:
Continue readingAnother bad idea from ALEC already passed in SC and NC and is now in the GA legislature, getting coverage in several national technical and political blogs: HB 282, which would effectively forbid municipal broadband if any commercial carrier offers 1.5Mbps. It's up for a hearing this week: time to call your state rep.
Timothy B. Lee wrote for ArsTechnica 14 Feb 2013, Bill would ban muni broadband if one home in census tract gets 1.5Mbps: Approach could leave some Georgia residents without a viable broadband option.
Continue reading
Incumbent broadband providers are pushing legislation that would restrict Georgia towns from building municipal broadband networks. Under the proposal, if a single home in a census tract has Internet access at speeds of 1.5Mbps or above, the town would be prohibited from offering broadband service to anyone in that tract.
State-level restrictions on municipal broadband networks are
Local governments here probably don’t want to get into the news
for the cost of their upcoming retreats, Lowndes County Commission
this month, and Valdosta City Council next month,
like Roswell alrady did.
Pat Fox wrote for the AJC 15 Feb 2013, Record shows $4,800 tab for Roswell retreat,
Roswell city officials ran up a tab of at least $4,800 for their three-day work retreat this month at the Reynolds Plantation, 106 miles away in Greensboro.
Financial records from five north Fulton cities show these planning sessions can run the gamut, from a shoestring event for $700 in Sandy Springs to more than $10,000 for Johns Creek.
The Roswell retreat, held Jan. 31-Feb. 2, included nine people — Mayor Jere Wood, six council members, City Administrator Kay Love and a facilitator, who did not charge for his services. All spent two nights at the Reynolds facility near Lake Oconee.
Perhaps stay close to home where hotels aren’t necessary.
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Something good out of Chattanooga? The city with the fastest metropolitan Internet access plans to turn that into jobs.
Elizabeth Prann wrote for Fox 26 January 2013, City turns Internet speeds into jobs, that Chattanooga
is home to most advanced smart grid in the nation, customers are enjoying Internet speeds that are almost 100 times faster than the national average. Most Internet users in the U.S. have access to about 4.5 megabits of Internet speed.
We wish! OK, you can get spees that fast here: with Verizon 4G LTE, not too many places via land access.
So what’s Chattanooga got that’s better?
Continue reading
The central city of a major MSA,
Austin, Texas, publishes its own video reporting on
local issues, like this one on local energy efficiency.
AustinEnergy has brought back its best offer ever deal, which allows customers to receive both rebates and a loan to make energy efficiency improvements. The rebates can total as much as $3200, and can cover as much as a third of the cost of the improvements, including the air conditioning unit. Remaining costs after the rebates can be financed through a low interest loan through the Austin Credit Union.
The best offer ever is financed in part by a $10 million better buildings grant from the U.S. Department of Energy….
Here’s the video:
Continue readingMy op-ed in the VDT today; I’ve added links, plus some more after the op-ed.
Continue reading
Finally! Kewaunee, Calvert Cliffs, and now Crystal River permanently closing say it’s time for Georgia to stop wasting money on Southern Company’s already over-budget and increasingly-late nukes and get on with solar power and wind off the coast: for jobs, for energy independence, and for clean air and plenty of clean water.
- February 2013:
- Duke Energy is closing the Crystal River nuclear reactor (Tampa Bay Times, 6 Feb 2013), 160 miles south of us, because nobody wants to pay to fix it: between “$1.5 billion and $3.4 billion, plus what it costs to buy power to replace what Crystal River would have produced while it is being repaired” [Charlotte Business Journal, 11 Jan 2013].
- November 2012:
- NRC terminated Maryland’s Calvert Cliffs 3 (NRC 1 Nov 2012) after Constellation Energy dropped out because the cost “is too high and creates too much risk for Constellation” [Bloomberg 10 Oct 2010].
San Onofre 4 will stay down, if opponents can stop the hidden experiment shell game. Maine Yankee was down for about a year, and never started up again.
Front page of the Bangor Daily News 28 May 1997, Maine Yankee plant may be closed down: Owners weigh repair costs, deregulation,
Maine Yankee President Mike Sellman said that spending will be reduced by about 20 percent, or $41 million, from June through December.
“I think every plant that I’m aware of that has made the decision to essentially curtail start-up activities has then gone ahead shut down permanently,” said Sellman.
Maine Yankee has been off line since Dec. 6, 1966. Several repair and improvement projects had been planned so the plant’s operators could seek Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval to restart and return the plant to service.
See also “It has to close because of the pocketbook.” —Kyle Jones on Maine Yankee nuclear power plant.
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Instead of demonstrating to influence legislators, sometimes it's better to get elected and legislate: that's what Kyle Jones did in Maine, and he closed the Maine Yankee nuke, de-monopolized the state's electrical utilities, and instituted a 30% renewable energy goal. All this was helped by the nuclear industry's own incompetence.
Bangor Daily News, Page A2, 28 May 1997, Maine Yankee plant may be closed down: Owners weigh repair costs, deregulation,
Cracking in the plant's steam generator tubes, which carry the superheated, radioactive water, was first discovered in 1990. In 1994, Main Yankee officials predicted that the plant's problems were over after they plugged more than 300 of the cracked tubes. However, testing of the tubes during a shutdown for refueling in 1995 revealed as many as 10,000 additional cracked tubes.
Sounds a lot like San Onofre.
At the time, it was estimated that permanently shutting down the plant would cost at least $316 million while, after 23 years of operation, Maine Yankee had collected only $100 million to pay for its decommissioning. The most recent estimate for decommissioning is $369 million, of which only $169 million has been raised as of this month.
Facing the accumulation of these engineering and operational difficulties, the owners of the plant signaled a departure from business-as-usual and, earlier this year, brought in the New Orleans-based Entergy Corp. to provide management services at Maine Yankee.
Oh, my! The same Entergy that's now likely to close Vermont Yankee. And Vermont Yankee wasn’t the first to follow this financial path to closure:
Continue readingHow can Lowndes County not have a list of who it sold waste collection center cards to? How can it not provide it in response to an open records request?
In the 9 October 2012 Regular Session, Lowndes County Manager Joe Pritchard said:
Just under 5,000 residents who have purchased the cards
That was in his curiously redacted summary of the history of solid waste handling in the county, and he was referring to the access cards to the waste collection centers.
Yet when April Huntley submitted an open records request asking
for the names of the 5,000 people who would be affected by the
waste collection centers, this is what County Clerk Paige Dukes
replied:
In regards to your open records requst for a copy of the 5,000 residents in unincorporated Lowndes County who will be affected by the closing of the recycling centers, the document you have requested does not exist.
Maybe this explains part of why Veolia, excuse me, ADS, seemed so confused yesterday morning. Come tonight to see if any Commissioners ask about this.
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