As usual, an incumbent on an appointed board asked to be reappointed and was.
She did show up and speak, although she said more when she was first appointed.
5.b. Keep Lowndes/Valdosta Beautiful Board
At the
10 June 2013 Work Session,
County Manager Joe Pritchard noted Continue reading
Invest in nukes for
hot water in rivers damaging plants and animals
while there’s less water for agriculture and cities
and droughts and summer heat waves cause power shortages.
That’s Europe’s experience.
Or we could profit by their experience and get on with
reliable renewable solar and wind power.
The Guardian, 12 August 2003,
Heatwave hits French power production,
France has shut down the equivalent of four nuclear power stations
as the heatwave eats into the country’s electricity generating
capacities. With temperatures in French rivers hitting record highs,
some power plants relying on river water to cool their reactors have
been forced to scale back production.
Julio Godoy wrote for OneWorld.net 28 July 2006,
European Heat Wave Shows Limits of Nuclear Energy,
Do we have designated positions for specific local businesses on our appointed boards?
It sure looks like it, at least for Wild Adventures.
5.a. Valdosta/Lowndes County Conference Center and Tourism Authority
At the Work Session 10 June 2013
County Manager Joe Pritchard said Commissioners had a letter of resignation
from Bob Montgomery from VLCCCTA,
and a letter (he didn’t say from whom)
recommending Molly Deese to replace Montgomery.
Pritchard said Deese had been “filling in” for Montgomery at VLCCCTA.
Interesting. So Wild Adventures can send someone unappointed to fill in
on an appointed board?
He didn’t say who Deese is, but she is Continue reading
Citizens still wanted to talk about solid waste after the
Commission adjourned the Tuesday 11 June 2013
Lowndes County Commission Regular Session.
Commissioners offered nothing but excuses.
Commissioner Page asked for
Mr. Wright
to stay behind so he could talk to him.
The Chairman adjourned; I didn’t hear or see any motion or second or vote.
Aren’t those required by state law?
The subsequent excuses included:
It’s not about right or wrong anymore.
Nevermind that most of the people in the room thought it was,
as well as many of the citizens and voters in the county.
We have to follow the process.
Nevermind they didn’t hold Continue reading
CCA loses contracts, including for its notorious
Gladiator School; GEO, too.
Some states are catching on to the private prison scam.
Aviva Shen wrote for ThinkProgress 21 June 2013,
Three States Dump Major Private Prison Company In One Month,
State lawmakers who embraced private prisons as a cost-cutting
measure are starting to have trouble ignoring their abysmal
conditions. Corrections Corporation of America, the largest and most
powerful private prison company in the nation, lost four prison
contracts in the past month after extensive reports of abuse,
neglect, and even fraud within their operations.Idaho cut ties with the corporation on Wednesday, which turned the
state’s largest prison into a violent hellhole inmates called
“Gladiator School.” Earlier this year, CCA was caught
understaffing the prison and using prison gangs to control the
population. The company admitted to falsifying nearly 4,800 hours of
staffing records to squeeze more money out of the state for
nonexistent security work. Shift logs at the prison showed the same
security guards working for 2 to 3 days at a time without breaks.Last week, Texas closed two CCA prisons, including Continue reading
Kennedy said he’d be for nukes if they were safe or economical, but they are neither, while solar and wind are both.
After calling
the pro-nuke movie Pandora’s Promise a hoax,
he addressed “safe” by pointing out the movie’s
claimed former anti-nuke leaders were
never leaders while major nuclear utility executives
are indeed now anti-nuke leaders.
(For example, I met
former TVA Chairman S. David Freeman
in DC where he was testifying against nukes.)
Then Kennedy tore into
Southern Company’s three-legged nuclear boondoggle
and pointed out solar and wind are winning even against massive distortions
in the economic playing field caused by public service commissions
letting regulated utilities make the rest of us pay for their profits
on uneconomic nukes.
Andrew Revkin posted on Youtube 19 June 2013,
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. & Director of Pandora’s Promise Spar Over Nuclear Power,
The last nuclear power plant constructed in the world was in Finland.
It cost about $11 billion a gigawatt.
Now I’m involved with construction right now of one of the largest
power plants that’s in north America which is in the Mojave Desert,
and it’s
a solar thermal plant, and it’s costing about $3 billion a
gigawatt….There’s no individual and there’s no merchant utility that will build
a nuclear power plant, because they’re so expensive.
You can’t make money on it.
The only ones who will build them are regulated utilities like
the Southern Company in Georgia… because
they make money by spending money.
They get reimbursed for their capital costs plus 12 or 15% per year.
So they’ll construct it
once they get approval from the public utility commission.
Then they want to spend as much money on their capital costs
because they’re not paying for it.
You and I are paying for it.I don’t think Bill Gates, or I saw Paul Allen was one of the
funders of this film, that they’re going to spend their own money
building one of these [nuclear] plants….
You could make energy by burning prime rib,
but why would you take the most expensive way to do it.
And by last fall, the cost per gigawatt of solar photovoltaic (PV) panels
was already under $3 billion per gigawatt
so distributed solar PV makes just as much sense as massive desert
thermal solar, and both make far more economic sense than nuclear.
Plus costs of solar PV keep going down, pushing solar deployments
up like compound interest, while nukes always take years to build
and
always cost more than budgeted.
Southern Company is the king of nuke cost overruns, going
26 times overbudget per unit on Vogtle 1 and 2
and already
19 months late and about a billion dollarsoverbudget on Vogtle 3 and 4.
Then there are the safety issues: a failed nuke can be Chernobyl
or Fukushima and many nukes
leak radioactive tritium into groundwater
and vent radiation into the air, while a failed solar plant is
a bunch of glass.
I got into the [solar] industry
to show that there was an alternative and that the alternative
was economically viable.
And not only that, on
a level playing field,
if we weren’t giving them the subsidies to the incumbents,
our technologies would beat them and soundly.
They simply couldn’t compete.
He called the movie’s claims that solar and wind don’t work
one of the movie’s many big lies
because even without a level playing field we already built more
solar and wind power in this country last year “than we did all
of the incumbents combined”.
Plus
you’ve got to fuel fossil or nuclear plants, not to mention
the toxic waste issues,
while once you build solar or wind “it’s free energy forever”.
Kennedy also pointed out the electric grid in the U.S. could be rebuilt to deliver solar and wind power as needed for less than has already been spent on breeder reactors that are no longer in use.
The filmmaker made no attempt to rebut any of Kennedy’s points about existing solar and wind technologies that already beat nukes, coal, and natural gas, instead going on about pie-in-the-sky modular reactors.
This all illustrates why
the Georgia Public Service Commission
needs to stop letting Georgia Power and Southern Company suck radioactive
profits at the public teat and make them
get on with replacing coal with solar
instead of
letting old coal plant sites sit unused for more than a decade.
Oh, and GA PSC needs to halt the Plant Vogtle nuke boondoggle,
which is even worse than
Southern Company’s Kemper Coal plant in Mississippi
as a huge transfer of wealth from the people of the state to a monopoly.
A monopoly that is supposed to be regulated as a public service.
By the Public Service Commission whose Commissioners
accept massive campaign contributions from employees and law firms
of the utilities they regulate.
It’s time for GA PSC to bat away the haze of coal smoke and the radioactive
taint that surrounds them
and go to bat against corruption and for the people of Georgia.
-jsq
Garry Gentry read the
WWALS Watershed Coalition letter
at
the Georgia Public Service Commission meeting Tuesday 18 June 2013.
The recent rains have swollen our blackwater rivers, Withlacoochee, Willacoochee, Alapaha, and Little, under our longleaf pines and Spanish-moss-covered oaks, and filled up the tea-colored tannin waters in our frog-singing pocosin cypress swamps here in central South Georgia. But that was only a dent in our protracted drought that ranges from mild to extreme, with projections not much better….
There is no need to use our Floridan Aquifer water to build more
baseload power plants while Georgia lags behind Michigan,
Massachusetts, and even tiny New Jersey and Maryland in solar power.WWALS calls on the PSC to ask Georgia Power to conserve our water
and to bring jobs to south Georgia through solar power and wind off
the Georgia coast.
You can read
the complete letter.
Here’s
the video:
Ask Georgia Power to conserve our water –Garry Gentry for WWALS
Georgia Power proposed closing of coal plants,
Administrative Session, GA Public Service Commission (GA PSC),
Doug Everrett (1: south Georgia), Tim Echols (2: east Georgia), Chairman Chuck Eaton (3: metro Atlanta), Stan Wise (5 north Georgia), Bubba McDonald (4: west Georgia),
Video by John S. Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE),
244 Washington Street SW, Atlanta, GA, 30334-9052, 18 June 2013.
-jsq
Someone made a very good case for the cost-effectivness of energy efficiency
for saving money, health, and comfort,
at
the Georgia Public Service Commission meeting Tuesday 18 June 2013.
He didn’t start by saying his name, and I had a camera battery replacement
about that time, but most of his talk is here.
Here’s
the video:
Energy efficiency is cost-effective –Another
Georgia Power proposed closing of coal plants,
Administrative Session, GA Public Service Commission (GA PSC),
Doug Everrett (1: south Georgia), Tim Echols (2: east Georgia), Chairman Chuck Eaton (3: metro Atlanta), Stan Wise (5 north Georgia), Bubba McDonald (4: west Georgia),
Video by John S. Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE),
244 Washington Street SW, Atlanta, GA, 30334-9052, 18 June 2013.
-jsq
“I’d like to see Georgia Power… provide a geothermal and solar net zero
energy concept for the project that could act as a demonstration project
for them as well,”
said someone unknown from Putnam County,
at
the Georgia Public Service Commission meeting Tuesday 18 June 2013.
(This is why to always say your name when you speak.)
Could have been
Putnam County Commissioner Alan Foster.
He also asked for a convention center, golf course, and lakefront activities
area, and naturally at least one Public Service Commissioner latched
onto the golf course.
The speaker said his “vision” involved privatization.
Seems to me the problem is the existing privatization of the GA PSC.
Here’s
the video:
Geothermal and net zero –Unknown
Georgia Power proposed closing of coal plants,
Administrative Session, GA Public Service Commission (GA PSC),
Doug Everrett (1: south Georgia), Tim Echols (2: east Georgia), Chairman Chuck Eaton (3: metro Atlanta), Stan Wise (5 north Georgia), Bubba McDonald (4: west Georgia),
Video by John S. Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE), 244 Washington Street SW, Atlanta, GA, 30334-9052, 18 June 2013.
-jsq
“This year we’re not even going to be able to hold the line on the millage rate,”
said Billy Webster, Putnam County Commissioner,
at
the Georgia Public Service Commission meeting Tuesday 18 June 2013.
He wants Georgia Power to do something to help reinvent the Plant Branch property.
He asked GA PSC to help Putnam County do that.
Here’s
the video:
Moving on and finances –Billy Webster, Putnam County Commission
Georgia Power proposed closing of coal plants,
Administrative Session, GA Public Service Commission (GA PSC),
Doug Everrett (1: south Georgia), Tim Echols (2: east Georgia), Chairman Chuck Eaton (3: metro Atlanta), Stan Wise (5 north Georgia), Bubba McDonald (4: west Georgia),
Video by John S. Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE),
244 Washington Street SW, Atlanta, GA, 30334-9052, 18 June 2013.
-jsq
