Tag Archives: Coal

Citizens for solar power; GA leg. not so much

Utility backers in the Georgia legislature tried scare tactics
to stop HB 657
(or anything else) from requiring more solar power from Georgia Power.
Still no solar tax, said citizens in

Savannah,

Columbus,

Gainesville,

Athens,
and now Atlanta.

Walter C. Jones wrote for the Florida Times-Union 31 October 2013,

Outlook for solar bill isn’t bright in Georgia.

Not sure why

this picture of me illustrates this story on facebook
(I wasn’t at the hearing in Atlanta),
but hey, why not.

Claudia Collier with Green Georgia drove from Savannah to speak at
the hearing.

“This bill will give us direct choice in where our electricity
comes from,” she said.

Rep. Mike Dudgeon, R-Johns Creek, pointed to the amount of solar
generation the Public Service Commission ordered Georgia Power to
acquire this year.

“It looks like the PSC is already managing the
situation,” he said.

As

Southern Company CEO Tom Fanning and Georgia Power CEO Paul Bowers
well know, Continue reading →

Video of citizens in Athens opposing Georgia Power solar tax

Another city, more citizens opposed to Georgia Power’s solar tax,
and to Georgia Power’s rate hikes for fossil fuels and nukes.

Hyacinth Manacap Empinado wrote for Athens Patch today,

“No” To Rate Hike for Georgia Power, Say Residents at Athens Meeting:
People urged Public Service Commissioner Tim Echols to vote against the Georgia Power rate hike request.,

Echols says that part of the money will be used to clean up older
coal plants and convert some plants to burn cleaner, natural gas.

If approved, Continue reading →

Fossil fuel divestment fastest

Not just

faster than apartheid divestment;
faster than divestment from tobacco, armaments, and others:
fossil fuel divestment.
It’s not about direct reduction of market capitalization;
it’s about making it socially unacceptable to buy from stigmatized
companies, and it works, and it’s working faster than ever for fossil fuels.
Oh, and fossil fuel companies are a tiny sliver of university endowments,
so ditching them is pain free,
especially now that

fossil fuel stock prices are not rising while solar stocks skyrocket
(and nuclear stocks don’t).
Go fossil free, go VSU.

Stranded Assets and the Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaign: What Does Divestment Mean for the Valuation of Fossil Fuel Assets?
8 October 2013 | Authors: Atif Ansar, Ben Caldecott, James Tilbury

Damian Carrington wrote for the Guardian Monday 7 October 2013

Campaign against fossil fuels growing, says study:
Investors being persuaded to take their money out of fossil fuel sector, according to University of Oxford study,

A campaign to persuade investors to take their money out of the fossil fuel sector is growing faster than any previous divestment campaign and could cause significant damage to coal, oil and gas companies, according to a
study from the University of Oxford.

The report compares the current
fossil fuel divestment campaign, which has attracted 41 institutions since 2010, with those against tobacco, apartheid in South Africa, armaments, gambling and pornography. It concludes that the direct financial impact of such campaigns on share prices or the ability to raise funds is small but the reputational damage can still have major financial consequences.

Continue reading →

Solar SAVE goes to SGA about fossil fuels @ VSU

SAVE‘s fossil fuel

divestment request made the
front page of

The Spectator at VSU,
and Danielle Jordan of SAVE was pullquote about fossil fuels
in another front page story, about solar panels on the Odum Library.
The student government didn’t vote to support SAVE’s request, but
many senators said they didn’t understand the subject and the student
government asked to get educated
about

fossil fuels and divestment.

Jordan Barela and Von Kennedy
wrote for The Spectator 24 October 2013,

Solar panels bring green energy to Odum,

VSU is moving in a greener direction.

A solar canopy was recently built behind Odum Library.

“We cannot address climate change without decreasing our dependency
on fossil fuels and solar is one way we could change that.”

—Danielle Jordan

The canopy is a 10 kilowatt solar array. The canopy produces energy
that goes directly to Odum Library, and does not go to the Georgia
Power grid.

Construction of the solar canopy began in September, and was
finished earlier this month.

“It is exciting,” Danielle Jordan, president of Students
Against Violating the Environment, said. “We cannot address
climate change without decreasing our dependency on fossil fuels and
solar is one way we could change that.”

The solar panels were manufactured by Continue reading →

Solar and wind cheaper than fossil fuels –more evidence

The most cost-effective power sources are solar and wind,
re-affirms a study that includes social costs,
such as the environmental costs of the climate
change caused by CO₂ from fossil fuels
(the social cost of carbon, or SCC),
and the health damage caused by sulfur dioxide pollution.
It’s time to stop paying for utility executive profits with our health and dollars.
No fracking, no pipeline.

M Caulfield wrote for Exposing the Truth 24 September 2013,

Renewable Energy Now Cheaper Than Fossil Fuel,

Renewable energy is becoming more and more
competitive. Alternative and renewable energy sources are increasingly
becoming more affordable. According to a new study published in the Journal
of Environmental Studies and Sciences, it is now less costly in
America to get electricity from wind turbines and solar panels, than it
is to get it from coal-fired power plants. The study shows, when climate
change costs and other health impacts were factored in, that it is even
more cost effective to convert an existing coal-fired power plant with
a wind turbine, than it is to keep the old fossil fuel-burning plant.

Unsubsidized renewable energy is now cheaper than electricity from coal and
gas power stations in Australia as well. Wind farms in Australia
can produce energy at AU$80/MWh. Meanwhile, coal plants are
producing energy at AU$143/MWh and gas at AU$116/MWh. And the myth that alternative energy sources
were enormously more costly than the typical
fossil fuels, is proving to be untrue. And after initial
investment costs are waged, making them now ameliorated, and the raw materials for solar and wind power are free, besides
costs of upkeep, and the harvesting of those sources doesn’t cause
mayhem to the environment. Making it an ever-more appealing alternative
energy source.

“The perception that fossil fuels are cheap and
renewables are expensive is now out of date… The
fact that wind power is now cheaper than coal and gas in a country with some of the world’s best fossil fuel
resources shows that clean energy is a game changer which promises to turn
the economics of power systems on its head,” – Michael Liebreich,
chief executive of Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

In lead author Laurie Johnson’s Blog 17 September 2013,

New Study: Clean Energy Least Costly to Power America’s Electricity Needs, Continue reading →

Fossil Free Valdosta

Fossil Free Valdosta, a facebook page just launched by
members of

S.A.V.E. (Students Against Violating the Environment),
under VSU’s new solar canopy:

A student campaign calling on Valdosta State University to freeze
any new investments in the fossil fuel industry immediately and
divest within the next five years.

You can help divestment by

signing their petition.
That will help

VSU stop wasting investments on fossil fuels while solar stocks skyrocket.
And that will help

undermine the political power of the fossil fuel industry.
After all,
all our investments are political, and

there’s nothing neutral about investing in climate wreckage.

-jsq

European utilities scared of renewable energy

Another reason

Southern Company needs to get on with a smart grid,
using its

biggest private R&D outfit in the U.S.
Now that

solar has reached grid parity with everything
including

natural gas
(and years since

it passed nuclear), if the utilities
don’t get out in front, they’re going to be left behind.

Derek Mead wrote for Motherboard yesterday,

European Utilities Say They Can’t Make Money Because There’s Too Much Renewable Energy,

Renewable energy has been on a tear the past few years, with growth in many countries spurred by subsidies for
wind and solar power. Now the heads of 10 European utility companies
say EU subsidies should end, because they've got more renewable
energy than they know what to do with.

The 10 CEOs in question, who refer to themselves as the Magritte
group because they first met in an art gallery, represent companies
that control about half the power capacity of Europe. The group gave
a press conference today—

Reuters says that 10 such executives
giving a joint public statement is “unprecedented”—to hammer
home a message they’ve been trumpeting ahead of an EU energy summit
in 2014: There’s too much energy capacity, which has driven prices
down so far that they can’t make any money.

As long as there are nukes or coal plants, there’s too much capacity.
European utilities need to get on with things like Continue reading →

Solar vs. fossil fuel stocks

Should Harvard President Drew Faust

worry that
“Significantly constraining investment options risks significantly constraining investment returns”?
Actually, if Harvard has been wasting investments in oil and gas for the
past year, its endowment has lost a bundle.
Ditto VSU.

Let’s compare stock performance of

Guggenheim Solar ETF (NYSE:TAN)
which invests in solar stocks with the

PowerShares DB Energy Fund (NYSEARCA:DBE),
which invests in oil and natural gas companies.
Yep, that’s

120% for TAN and 0% for DBE:

Sure, if you go back farther, solar stocks continued to drop after 2009
until this year: Continue reading →

Our investments are political –Divest Harvard to Drew Faust

Divest Harvard

summed it up:

Our investments ARE political.

And that’s just as true at VSU.

Not even

Tim DeChristopher put it more pithily than that.
Samantha Caravello wrote in the Harvard Law Record 7 October 2013,

Pres. Faust, There’s Nothing Neutral About Investing in Climate Wreckage,
noting that

Pres. Faust’s excuses
were actually in response to
“an invitation from undergraduates to participate in an open forum
on divesting Harvard’s $32 billion endowment from the top 200 fossil
fuel companies.”

President Faust warned against using the endowment in ways that
would position the university as a political actor, claiming Continue reading →

Divestment is about undermining the political power of the fossil fuel industry –Tim DeChristopher

Answering

Harvard President Drew Faust’s excuses,

Tim DeChristopher, who

went to jail for directly opposing gas and oil drilling
and is now

a student at Harvard Divinity School,

To seriously suggest that any research will solve the climate crisis
while we continue to allow the fossil fuel industry to maintain a
stranglehold on our democracy is profoundly naive.

Wen Stephenson
wrote for the Nation 4 October 2013,

Tim DeChristopher: There Is No ‘Neutral’ in the Climate Fight,
including DeChristopher’s statement:

Drew Faust seeks a position of neutrality in a struggle where the
powerful only ask that people like her remain neutral. She says that
Harvard’s endowment shouldn’t take a political position, and yet it
invests in an industry that spends countless millions on corrupting
our political system. In a world of corporate personhood, if she
doesn’t want that money to be political, she should put it under her
mattress. She has clearly forgotten the words of Paolo Freire:
“Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and
powerless means to side with the powerful, not to remain
neutral.”
Or as Howard Zinn put succinctly, “You can’t
be neutral on a moving train.”

She touts Continue reading →

On the LAKE front

Citizen dialog for transparent process by the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange