Tag Archives: California

Is Porter Ranch the natural gas industry’s Three Mile Island?

Thirty-six years ago, Three Mile Island turned public opinion against nuclear power.


The worst in history, right now still spewing after three months
and Los Angeles County and the state of California have declared emergencies
at Porter Ranch,
is the “natural” gas industry’s Three Mile Island.

Nuclear, too was touted as safe, clean, and infamously “too cheap to meter”.
It turned out to be none of those things, and neither is fracked methane.
Three Mile Island alone didn’t stop the thousands of nukes President Nixon promised,
but it sure helped.
The Porter Ranch disaster has already lasted far longer, had worse direct effects, and is in the nation’s second-largest metropolitan area.



Plus TMI was the first U.S. civilian nuclear accident.
The “natural” gas industry has leaks, corrosion, fires, explosions, and now earthquakes monthly and sometimes daily.
Sure, the shadow of nuclear war hung over the nuclear power industry, but the monthly fireballs from methane explosions hangs over the natural gas industry.
The 2010 San Bruno, California explosion is back in the news because, says AP 13 January 2015:
PROSECUTORS: PG&E RESISTED RECORD-KEEPING CHANGE AFTER SAN BRUNO BLAST.



It’s time for a complete moratorium on all new natural gas projects,
like the moratorium on all new nuclear projects after Three Mile Island.
Instead, let’s get on with what we didn’t have back then:
solar and wind power already less expensive than any other sources of power,
far cleaner and safer, much faster to deploy, using no water, and requiring no eminent domain.

In

1962 President John F. Kennedy famously said: Continue reading →

Demanding the state PUC get a friendly judge: a best practice for utilities?


300x225 Title page, in A Best Practices Leadership Forum for Small Utilities, by Carol A. Brown, Chief of Staff to President Michael R. Peevey, 2 April 2013
A utility didn’t stop at blowing up a Calfornia neighborhood,
it also demanded the Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) get a favorable judge
for that 2010 San Bruno natural gas pipe explosion.
The CPUC president’s chief of staff just last year wrote slides
praising his Legacy as Best Practices.
Does that legacy include suborning justice?
He’s still there, although she was fired, and three PG&E executives
“ended their employment”.
How many other PG&E and other utility executives and CPUC and other
state regulators follow those same Best Practices?

Ellen Knickmeyer, Associated Press, 15 September 2014,
PG&E Officials Removed for Improper Communications,



Four senior officials with Pacific Gas & Electric Co. and the state
commission regulating it were removed or resigned over emails
released Monday showing the utility and state regulators appeared to
negotiate which judge would be assigned to hear one of the utility’s
rate cases.

The emails show the commission ultimately assigned to the case a
judge for whom PG&E had expressed a preference, rather than another
judge who PG&E said “has a history of being very hard on us.”



Also Monday, California Public Utilities Commission president
Michael Peevey, who was included Continue reading →

Solar Power Hot Topic on LAKE blog

Some like pithy posts, and others like long historical
summaries: see
the Solar Hot Topic for the latter.


I’ve just added links about solar parking lots, Oakland, CA, Dublin, GA and Lowndes High Schools, and super-lobbying group ALEC’s efforts in every state
legislature to oppose solar power.

Solar will win, simply because it’s already cheaper than anything else
and the prices keep going down. The fossil industry will delay as long
as possible to suck up more profit, but even Wall Street has turned
against fossilized utilities that aren’t doing renewables yet. We the
people will win. We just need to stop the fossil junkies from doing more
damage before they lose. The sun is already rising.

-jsq

All new U.S. energy was solar in October 2013

While

ten nukes were shut down or cancelled in 2013,
solar power continues its compound-interest-curve ever-faster deployment.
Zero (0) new nukes were built in 2013 and in October all
new U.S. utility-scale power was solar.
Unfortunately, the biggest of those was Southern Company’s Campo Verde,
which powers California, not Georgia or the southeast, but that is changing now.

Todd Woody wrote for The Atlantic 26 November 2013,

Solar Energy Was America’s Sole New Power Source in October:
Get ready for a photovoltaic building boom.



In October, power plants generating 530 megawatts of electricity came online in the United States. And

every single electron put on the grid came from the sun,
according to a report released today.

That’s apparently not even counting rooftop solar.

The report is

Solar the sole capacity completed in October, at 530 MW,
by Althena Enguerra for SNL 25 November 2013. Continue reading →

Solar is now competitive with … natural gas –Crossborder Energy study

Colorado, California, North Carolina: when will Georgia catch up in solar power?
What will it take to get the Georgia legislature to realize all Georgians
will benefit economically from much more solar power than

GA PSC in July required Georgia Power to buy?
And why should we permit

a methane gas pipeline to gash through Georgia
to profit executives in Houston and Juno Beach, Florida
when we could be deploying solar everywhere in Georgia
for

local jobs, profit, lower electric bills, and clean air and water?

Here’s
the study
that showed solar benefits outweigh costs in North Carolina,

The Benefits and Costs
of Solar Generation
for Electric Ratepayers
in North Carolina,
by R. Thomas Beach and
Patrick G. McGuire for Crossborder Energy, 18 October 2013.

Wholesale solar PPA prices provide perhaps the most dramatic
evidence of the continued decline in solar PV costs. Solar PPA
prices have fallen dramatically over the past several years, to the
point that, in some regions of the U.S., solar is now competitive
with other generation resources, including wind and natural gas.
Xcel Energy in Colorado recently announced that it is proposing to
add 170 MW of utility-scale solar to its system, with its CEO
stating “[f]or the first time ever, we are adding cost
competitive utility scale solar to the system.”33
The
California electric utilities make public each year the average PPA
prices for renewable contracts approved by the CPUC in the prior
year. Figure 3 shows the trend in the prices for their solar PV
PPAs; CPUC contract approval can occur up to a year or more after
bids are received, so the figure is indicative of prices through
roughly 2011.34
2012 solicitations for solar PPAs in California in
the 3 MW to 20 MW size range through the Renewable Auction Mechanism
(RAM) have yielded market-clearing prices in the
8 to 9 cents
per
kWh range.3


The Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) conducts and publishes
regular national surveys of the installed costs of solar PV; these
surveys include Continue reading →

Solar Oakland Schools expect 45% savings


Maybe local school districts would like to do this.

Dublin, GA High School did.

Lowndes County School District has the bond rating to do it.

SunPower PR in WSJ today,

Oakland Unified School District Plans to Reduce Electricity Costs by Nearly Half with SunPower Solar Systems at 16 Schools,

SAN JOSE, Calif., Dec. 5, 2013 /PRNewswire/ — SunPower Corp.
(NASDAQ: SPWR) today announced that it is designing and building
high efficiency SunPower solar power systems for 16 schools in the
Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) in Oakland, Calif. Once
completed in 2014, the district estimates it will reduce electricity
costs at those facilities by 46 percent.



“Our contract with SunPower will enable Oakland Unified School
District to Continue reading →

Jellyfish 1 Nuke 0



One of the world’s largest nuclear reactors was shut down Sunday by jellyfish.
Not a tsunami, not an earthquake, not a blizzard, not even hot water: jellyfish.
And it’s not the first time or the first reactor.
Tell me again how reliable centralized baseload power is?

AP reported yesterday,

Jellyfish force nuclear plant shutdown in Sweden:
Tonnes of jellyfish clog pipes that bring in cool water to the plant’s turbines



Operators of the Oskarshamn nuclear plant in southeastern Sweden had
to scramble reactor number three on Sunday after tonnes of jellyfish
clogged the pipes that bring in cool water to the plant’s turbines.

By Tuesday, the pipes had been cleaned of the jellyfish and
engineers were preparing to restart the reactor, which at 1,400
megawatts of output is the largest boiling-water reactor in the
world, said Anders Osterberg, a spokesman for OKG, the plant
operator.

All three Continue reading →

Diablo Canyon nuclear units 2 and 1 down one after another

The local newspaper didn’t look past PG&E’s news about unit 2 coming back up (lightning strike)
to notice that unit 1 had been down (pipe leak) a few weeks before.


Diablo Canyon 1 and 2 from 16 June 2013 to 16 July 2013

David Sneed wrote for the San Luis Obispo Tribune 16 July 2013,

Diablo Canyon’s Unit 2 reactor back at full power, Continue reading →

Sterlizing female inmates without approval: California prisons

As recently as 2010. Has anybody checked Georgia prisons recently?

Corey G. Johnson
wrote for Center for Investigative Reporting 7 July 2013,

Female inmates sterilized in California prisons without approval,



Doctors under contract with the California Department of Corrections
and Rehabilitation sterilized nearly 150 female inmates from 2006 to
2010 without required state approvals, The Center for Investigative
Reporting has found.

At least 148 women received tubal ligations in violation of prison
rules during those five years — and there are perhaps 100 more
dating back to the late 1990s, according to state documents and
interviews.

From 1997 to 2010, the state paid doctors $147,460 to perform the
procedure, according to a database of contracted medical services
for state prisoners.

The women were signed up for the surgery while they were pregnant
and housed at either the California Institution for Women in Corona
or Valley State Prison for Women in Chowchilla, which is now a men’s
prison.

How did this happen?

Continue reading →

L.A. rooftop solar sprawling power plant

The L.A. Times’ online poll is currently running 92% yes on
“Is distributed generation the future of electric grids?”
And Los Angeles is doing something about distributed rooftop solar power.
Something we could be doing right here in south Georgia.
If Georgia Power won’t do it, local governments could.
After all, if the Industrial Authority can float bonds to buy
land for business parks that sit vacant, it could float bonds
to fund rooftop solar.
Or maybe sell some of that land to pay for solar.

John Upton wrote for grist 27 June 2013,

L.A. launches nation’s largest solar rooftop program,



The first small shoots of what will grow into a sprawling solar
power plant have sprouted in Los Angeles.

L.A.’s Department of Water and Power is rolling out the country’s
biggest urban rooftop program, which will pay residents for solar
energy they produce in excess of their own needs. That will give
residents a reason to install more solar capacity on their roofs
than they can use in their homes.

According to
Catherine Green in the L.A. Times yesterday,

L.A. program lets DWP pay customers to generate solar power:
Clean L.A. Solar’s goal is to add 150 megawatts, or enough to power 30,000 homes, to the city grids. Continue reading →