What pollutes almost as much as one and a half coal plants per permanent job? The proposed Keystone XL Pipeline. Does that sound like a good deal to you?
Talia Buford and Darren Goode wrote for Politico 1 March 2013, State Dept. Keystone report plays down climate fears, Continue reading
BP must be getting desperate about people catching onto what they did to the Gulf.
A BP video ad has been replaying itself every few minutes beside various
news stories since yesterday, claiming two years after the oil disaster
(“spill” doesn’t describe it) “the beaches are open for everyone to enjoy!”
BP’s website
says “We are helping economic and environmental restoration efforts in the Gulf Coast as part of our ongoing commitment to the region following the Deepwater Horizon accident in 2010”.
Neither the ad nor the website says BP actually cleaned up the oil.
Because they didn’t.
It’s still there, as is the even more toxic “dispersant” Corexit BP
dumped on top of the oil to make it sink.
Both are busily poisoning dolphins, fish, birds, and humans.
Antonia Juhasz wrote for The Nation 7 May 2012, Investigation: Two Years After the BP Spill, A Hidden Health Crisis Festers,
Continue reading
Spring means soon time for the Southern Company Stockholder meeting!
See what one of the biggest electric utilities in the world is up to,
and maybe make a few suggestions.
Here are videos of what you missed last year, and here is the official SO notice for this year (I got a link to it because I’m a shareholder): Notice of Annual Meeting of Stockholders of The Southern Company
DATE: Wednesday, May 22, 2013 TIME: 10:00 a.m., ET PLACE: The Lodge Conference Center at Callaway Gardens
Highway 18
Pine Mountain, Georgia 3182
It includes a list of Items of Business, which doesn’t mention that
stockholders are usually allowed to ask questions.
Those questions are usually answered by Thomas A. fanning,
Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer,
who included a letter (text below) in which he recites
his usual list of energy sources, in his usual order: Continue reading
The agenda is different for today’s Industrial Authority meeting!
It has even less information than usual:
no reports about PR or marketing or existing or new projects;
nothing about business parks, and no executive director’s report.
It does list an attorney report and an audit update.
Here’s the agenda.
Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority
Agenda
Tuesday, April 16, 2013 5:30 p.m.
Industrial Authority Conference Room
2110 N. Patterson StreetGeneral Business
- Call to Order
- Invocation
- Welcome Guests
Minutes
- Regular Meeting, March 8, 2013
Financial
- Review Compiled Balance Sheet and Income Statements for March 2013
- Audit Update
Attorney Report
Citzens Wishing To Be Heard
Adjourn General Meeting
Mission of the Valdosta Lowndes County Industrial Authority is to
lead economic development in our community by supporting existing industries
recruiting industries through capitalizing on opportunities for collaboration.-jsq
And they know compound annual growth, even at a low 22% rate, is going to cause them a heap of trouble.
More from the
Edison Electric Institute January 2013 report,
Disruptive Challenges: Financial Implications and Strategic Responses to a Changing Retail Electric Business (rehosted on the LAKE web server, since it disappered from the EEI server),
The decline in the price of PV panels from $3.80/watt in 2008 to $0.86/watt in mid-20121. While some will question the sustainability of cost-curve trends experienced, it is expected that PV panel costs will not increase (or not increase meaningfully) even as the current supply glut is resolved. As a result, the all-in cost of PV solar installation approximates $5/watt, with expectations of the cost declining further as scale is realized;
Sure, costs won’t continue to drop forever, but Continue reading
Utilities say that like it’s a bad thing.
The same utilities that
left millions without power in the U.S.
repeatedly last
year, and that
gouge ratepayers for 10% or more profits.
Moore’s Law continues
to drive solar costs down and installations up,
with increasingly more each like compound interest.
Utilties need to adapt or get out of the way.
Last November Moody’s reported that solar and wind were eroding credit for coal and gas power plants, and were already having ‘a profound negative impact’ on the competitiveness of thermal generation companies. That was in Europe. David Roberts wrote for Grist yesterday, Solar panels could destroy U.S. utilities, according to U.S. utilities,
The thing to remember is that it is in a utility’s financial interest to generate (or buy) and deliver as much power as possible. The higher the demand, the higher the investments, the higher the utility shareholder profits. In short, all things being equal, utilities want to sell more power. (All things are occasionally not equal, but we’ll leave those complications aside for now.)
And they want to produce that power from big baseload power stations for their economy of scale while the monopoly power utilities get guaranteed profits, not to mention huge ratepayer and loan-guaranteed boondoggles like the new nukes at Plant Vogtle. (Electric Member Cooperatives are somewhat different.)
Continue readingNow, into this cozy business model enters cheap distributed solar PV, which eats away at it like acid.
What does it take to turn a city into a solar power powerhouse of jobs and clean energy profit? Mostly the will to do it, plus some public relations and business relations.
Felicity Barringer wrote for NYTimes 8 April 2013, With Help From Nature, a Town Aims to Be a Solar Capital, the mayor of Lancaster, California, R. Rex Parris, said,
“We want to be the first city that produces more electricity from solar energy than we consume on a daily basis,”
And then the city of Lancaster took action, requiring
that almost all new homes either come equipped with solar panels or be in subdivisions that produce one kilowatt of solar energy per house. He also was able to recruit the home building giant KB Home to implement his vision, despite the industry’s overall resistance to solar power.
Result, according to one solar tracker?
Continue reading
Fossil fuels get more than $70 billion dollars a year in
U.S. government subsidies (tax breaks and direct spending),
while solar and wind get only about $12 billion,
so fossil fuels got more than five times as much,
while
nuclear got ten times as much (especially
in Georgia).
Even corn ethanol, that sounded-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time
boondoggle, gets more subsidies than solar and wind put together.
That’s without even going into the externalities such as healthcare costs due to polution, environmental destruction through mountaintop removal for coal, tar sands oil drilling, and fracking for natural gas, and wars for oil and uranium.
Continue reading
The biggest solar rooftop installation in Georgia?
Not by mighty Georgia Power, not by an EMC, not even by GaSU:
it’s IKEA’s distribution center in Chatham County.
Chatham is also trailing only Atlanta in solar installations in general.
Mary Landers wrote for Savannahnow.com 7 January 2013, New solar adds to Chatham’s growing inventory,
Just in time for the new year, and for a tax break for the old one, Consolidated Utilities began producing electricity from solar panels at its water treatment plant in west Chatham County on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve.
“When I left on Monday the meter was receiving power,” said Tony Abbott, president of Consolidated Utilities, a private local water company.
The 416-panel, 100-kilowatt system is big enough to power about 10 average homes for 25 years, said Julian Smith, of SolarSmith, which installed the system. At the water treatment site, however, solar will instead power the blowers that keep the sewage ponds aerated. The panels occupy previously useless property in a flood zone, Smith noted.
OK, the Wiregrass Solar installation at Valdosta’s Mud Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant is larger, and the Valdosta City Council recently voted to expand it further. Go Valdosta!
But what about IKEA?
It’s not the largest solar installation in the county. That honor still goes to the IKEA distribution center, which in October plugged in its 1,460-kilowatt solar array on the roof of its distribution center. That IKEA installation is in fact the largest in the state.
Back in July I mentioned that IKEA was going to build that array, and IKEA was building almost as much solar as all of Georgia Power’s parent Southern Company. BusinessWire reported 9 Oct 2012 IKEA Plugs-In Georgia’s Largest Private Solar Rooftop Array on Savannah Distribution Center: Surpasses 75% U.S. Solar Presence.
This installation represents the 34th completed solar project for IKEA in the U.S., with five more locations underway, making the eventual U.S. solar presence of IKEA nearly 89% of its U.S. locations, generating with a total 38 MW. IKEA owns and operates each of its solar PV energy systems atop its buildings — as opposed to a solar lease or PPA (power purchase agreement) — and globally has allocated €590 million to invest in renewable energy, focusing on solar and wind during the coming three years. This investment reinforces the long-term commitment of IKEA to sustainability and confidence in photovoltaic (PV) technology. More than 250,000 solar panels have been installed on IKEA stores and buildings across the world. The company also owns and/or operates approximately 110 wind turbines in Europe.
The Savannahnow article mentions something happening in Chatham County but not so much yet in Lowndes County:
“What’s really going on in Chatham is that lots of homeowners put solar on their rooftops,” Arora said. “The excitement exists in Chatham for solar.”
-jsq
Lou Raguse write for WIVB.com 4 April 2013, Cheektowaga picks fight with big banks,
CHEEKTOWAGA, N.Y. (WIVB)—Neighbors in Cheektowaga say empty houses are ruining the value of their neighborhoods and bringing in unwanted guests.
Residents want to know why these properties, seized by banking giants, have been left to crumble. The town board says they have serious issues with the homeowners.
“In normal life, you would call them slumlords,” says Town Board Member Charlie Markel.
Those so-called “slumlords” are big banks like Bank of America and Chase. Markel says in too many cases, a homeowner falls behind on a mortgage and the bank begins to foreclose. But then, it stops short. He says the bank continues paying property tax but allows the homes to fall into disrepair, never allowing them back on the market for sale, or to be auctioned.
Let’s remember what last year’s study of America’s richest and poorest cities found about the Valdosta MSA:
Despite these positives, 14.4 percent of housing units were vacant last year [2011], higher than the national vacancy rate of 13.1 percent.
I wonder how big national and multinational banks are serving our area? And with a vacancy rate that high, and housing prices still dropping, why are we building more houses?
-jsq