Tag Archives: power

Sun and wind are winning over fracked methane shale gas –Goldman Sachs

Solar PV, onshore wind, electric vehicles, and LED lighting will win for all of us and profit in the next five years, says Goldman Sachs, which just put $150 billion of its own money where its mouth is.
How about you, world leaders gathered in Paris?

Chris Martin, BloombergBusiness, 30 November 2015,

Wind, Solar Power to Supply More Energy Than Shale, Goldman Says,

New wind turbines and solar panels worldwide will provide more
energy over the next five years than U.S. shale-oil production has
over the past five, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc.


Four Front Runners

The leading renewable-energy technologies will add the equivalent of
6.2 million barrels of oil a day to the global energy mix, exceeding
the 5.7 million barrels a day pumped from U.S. shale oil wells since
2010, analysts including Brian Lee and Jaakko Kooroshy said in a
research report Monday….

“Wind and solar are on track to exceed 100 gigawatts in new
installations for the first time,” Continue reading →

Land is not just money: appeal tax valuations today




Appeal today if you think there’s more to land (or business)
and woods and fields and streams than money,
unlike the Tax Assessors, whose revaluation would drive development
into agricultural areas of the county where it doesn’t belong,
while avoiding populated areas such as the south side of Valdosta.
We can expect pipeline companies and utilities from other states
to think nothing of pillaging our lands for their profit.
We shouldn’t expect that of our neighbors whom we elected Tax Asssessors.
If you have affection for your land, your county, your neighborhood,
today’s the deadline

to appeal your valuation.
And there will be an election later.

As Wendell Berry said,



Whatever has happened in what economists call “the
economy,” it is generally true that the land economy has been
discounted or ignored.

Are the Tax Assessors boomers?
Are you a sticker?
Wendell Berry explains: Continue reading →

Reopen the KJ investigation

I agree with the pathologist who did the second autopsy
and found new evidence,
Dr. William Anderson:

“My recommendation is to redo the investigation,” Anderson said
Wednesday morning. “Open it back up and find out what happened.”

Jordan Conn wrote for Grantland yesterday,

A Death in Valdosta,



Multisport athlete Kendrick Johnson was found dead in his Georgia
high school’s gymnasium in January. Authorities ruled it an
accident, but Johnson’s family believed something very different
— and a second autopsy appears to support their suspicions.

I don’t always agree with Rev. Rose, but I still do on this one:
the number of people colluding to cover up a thing like this would
be most impressive.

However, the GBI is involved, and after

the Quitman 10 are now several
years without a “speedy” trial, GBI involvement taints the case.
So with the new evidence let’s see a new investigation.

The Grantland story is confused about Continue reading →

The sun came up on a different world —Julian Assange

Julian Assange of Wikileaks spoke from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London today (video, text):

The next time somebody tells you that it is pointless to defend the rights we hold dear, remind them of your vigil in the dark outside the Embassy of Ecuador, and how, in the morning, the sun came up on a different world, and a courageous Latin American nation took a stand for justice.

The British government made a stunning mistake in throwing away the worldwide goodwill just gained through the London Olympic Games, by actually beginning to storm a sovereign embassy in violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations that was observed throughout the Cold War. How could they be so foolish? This man, this reporter and publisher, they think is somehow more dangerous to them than the armed might of the Soviet Union was? This is as if JFK arrested MLK after John Glenn’s first orbital flight (a step which JFK fortunately did not take).


There is something you can do,
even when the world is turned upside down:

Continue reading →

Privatizing water: could it happen here?

Water, the next oil: many big companies have already been betting on that for years now. Do we want privatize companies controling our water supplies for their profit, running up prices at our expense? We can prevent that, and we should get on with it.

Jeneen Interlandi wrote for Newsweek 8 October 2010, The New Oil: Should private companies control our most precious natural resource?

…privately owned water utilities will charge what the market can bear, and spend as little as they can get away with on maintenance and environmental protection. Other commodities are subject to the same laws, of course. But with energy, or food, customers have options: they can switch from oil to natural gas, or eat more chicken and less beef. There is no substitute for water, not even Coca-Cola. And, of course, those other things don’t just fall from the sky on whoever happens to be lucky enough to be living below. “Markets don’t care about the environment,” says Olson. “And they don’t care about human rights. They care about profit.”

Well, that couldn’t happen here. Or could it? What about this:

Many of us have no idea where our water comes from….

Do you know what’s upstream of you, that might be getting into your water? Do you know what’s downstream of you, that your runoff migh be getting into? If you’re like me, you’ll have to look that up.

Remember what Ben Copeland said: Orlando, Jacksonville, and Tallahassee “all have their straws in that same aquifer.” The Floridan aquifer, which is the source of most of our drinking water. Our rivers and streams help replenish the Floridan aquifer, but we’re using it up faster than rain falls.

The article goes on about Bolivia privatizing water as a condition of “austerity”, until

Continue reading →

Powering North Carolina with wind, sun, and water

Here's some hard evidence of

FERC Chairman Jon Wellinghoff's assertion back in 2009
that baseload is outdated, we don't need any new nukes or coal,
because we can get all the new power we need from sun and wind.
This study from North Carolina goes further:
we don't need coal or nukes at all.

John Blackburn, Ph.D. wrote a report March 2010,

Matching Utility Loads with Solar and Wind Power in North Carolina:
Dealing with Intermittent Electricity Sources,

Takoma Park, Maryland, and Durham, North Carolina, March 4, 2010:
Solar and wind power can supply the vast majority of North
Carolina's electricity needs, according to a major report released
today. Combined with generation from hydroelectric and other
renewable sources, such as landfill gas, only six percent of
electricity would have to be purchased from outside the system or
produced at conventional plants.


Hourly Power Generation and Load for a sample day in July

"Even though the wind does not blow nor the sun shine all the time,
careful management, readily available storage and other renewable
sources, can produce nearly all the electricity North Carolinians
consume," explained Dr. John Blackburn, the study's author. Dr.
Blackburn is Professor Emeritus of Economics and former Chancellor
at Duke University.

"Critics of renewable power point out that solar and wind sources
are intermittent," Dr. Blackburn continued. "The truth is that solar
and wind are complementary in North Carolina. Wind speeds are
usually higher at night than in the daytime. They also blow faster
in winter than summer. Solar generation, on the other hand, takes
place in the daytime. Sunlight is only half as strong in winter as
in summertime. Drawing wind power from different areas — the
coast, mountains, the sounds or the ocean — reduces variations
in generation. Using wind and solar in tandem is even more reliable.
Together, they can generate three-fourths of the state's
electricity. When hydroelectric and other renewable sources are
added, the gap to be filled is surprisingly small. Only six percent
of North Carolina's electricity would have to come from conventional
power plants or from other systems."

Six percent is a small number.
That means most coal plants could be shut down,
and no nukes are needed.

Continue reading →

Occupy Valdosta Flyers



Already more people have signed up to march Friday than showed up
at the Chamber’s event last night.
Here are
some flyers.
There’s an Occupy Valdosta organizational meeting tonight;
more in the blog after that.
The traditional media are starting to flock around, as well.

-jsq

Solar: jobs, leadership, grid, independence, and health

Peak power when you need it: solar.
Somebody has been studying it, and addressing problems
local decisionmakers right here in south Georgia have been raising.


Solar Power Generation in the US:
Too expensive, or a bargain?
by
Richard Perez, ASRC, University at Albany,
Ken Zweibel, GW Solar Institute, George Washington University,
Thomas E. Hoff, Clean Power Research.
That’s Albany, New York, but it applies even more to Albany, Georgia
and Lowndes County, Georgia, since we’re so much farther south,
with much more sun.

Let’s cut to the chase:



The fuel of heat waves is the sun; a heat wave cannot take place without a
massive local solar energy influx. The bottom part of Figure 2 illustrates
an example of a heat wave in the southeastern US in the spring of 2010
and the top part of the figure shows the cloud cover at the same time:
the qualitative agreement between solar availability and the regional
heat wave is striking. Quantitative evidence has also shown that the
mean availability of solar generation during the largest heat wave
driven rolling blackouts in the US was nearly 90% ideal (Letendre et
al. 2006). One of the most convincing examples, however, is the August
2003 Northeast blackout that lasted several days and cost nearly $8
billion region wide (Perez et al., 2004). The blackout was indirectly
caused by high demand, fueled by a regional heat wave3. As little as 500
MW of distributed PV region wide would have kept every single cascading
failure from feeding into one another and precipitating the outage. The
analysis of a similar subcontinental scale blackout in the Western US
a few years before that led to nearly identical conclusions (Perez et
al., 1997).

In essence, the peak load driver, the sun via heat waves and A/C demand,
is also the fuel powering solar electric technologies. Because of this
natural synergy, the solar technologies deliver hard wired peak shaving
capability for the locations/regions with the appropriate demand mix
peak loads driven by commercial/industrial A/C that is to say, much
of America. This capability remains significant up to 30% capacity
penetration (Perez et al., 2010), representing a deployment potential
of nearly 375 GW in the US.

The sun supplies solar power when you need it:
at the same time the sun drives heat waves.

The paper identifies the problem I’ve encountered talking to local
policy makers, especially ones associated with power companies:

Continue reading →

PSC lining up to vote for solar

Previously

PSC Chair Lauren McDonald said he wanted Georgia Power to
“come up with options in the next 30 days for expanding the tiny amount of electricity generated from solar power”.
Yesterday,

PSC Commissioner Chuck Eaton
said “Solar is great for diversity, independence, research, and business,”
and added that until recently he had discounted solar, but now he had seen it.
And it turns out that Friday

PSC Commissioner Tim Echols
wrote an op-ed saying



It wasn’t until I entered the training room of Mage Solar in Dublin
and saw 40 subcontractors in their solar academy that I got it. The
growing solar industry is not just about funky collectors on a roof or
left-leaning environmentalists who hate fossil fuel. It is about skilled
jobs in manufacturing and construction, about economic development in
Georgia, about consumers saving money on their power bill so they can
spend it somewhere else, and about empowering people to essentially
create their own power plant. This could eventually be big.

That’s three out of

five commissioners.
I’d call that a majority shaping up to do something in the

PSC Energy Committee meeting of 16 July 2011.
I couldn’t say what, exactly, since there nothing

on the energy committee’s agenda
about this.
But something solar seems to be in the works.

-jsq

High-Voltage Grid of the Future — Daniel E. Frank

No new grid is needed

to profit by becoming electrical generators on your own rooftops,
but with a smarter grid south Georgia can export power to Atlanta and beyond.

I found this over in

NO COAL PLANT IN BEN HILL COUNTY!
with this comment by Dan Corrie:

This Georgia Tech announcement emphasizes how quickly technology is
changing toward healthier energy production and away from coal. I would
hate to see our South Georgia stuck with a contaminating, health-harming
coal plant for 50 years while so much progress would be going on during
that time.

The article by Daniel E. Frank dated 18 May 2011
appears on a law firm’s page,

Georgia Tech Clean Energy Speaker Series: “High-Voltage Grid of the Future”:

Continue reading →