Tag Archives: Texas

AT&T can do gigabit when competing with Google Fiber



A challenge gets the
incumbents beyond selling slow and expensive as long as they can.
Both these networks will use fiber optics, and that plus fast wireless to
reach everybody else would be very interesting.

Roger Cheng wrote for Cnet yesterday,

AT&T attempts to out-Google Google in Austin fiber race:
The telco says it will begin offering its “GigaPower” service to Austin and surrounding areas this year, with further expansion and a 1-gigabit connection planned in 2014. But how much will it cost?

The company said on late Monday that it would launch its “GigaPower”
super-fast home Internet service on December 1 in Austin, a city
that Google has said it would deploy its own speedy Google Fiber
service.

GigaPower would start with speeds of 300 megabit per second, or
roughly 40 times the speed of the average U.S. Internet home
connection, before upgrading customers to 1 gigabit per second next
year. Google also plans to offer its own 1-gigabit connection some
time next year.

By moving first Continue reading →

Florida Power and Light selected Sabal Trail for pipeline through Georgia

A Florida company selected a Texas company
that can use eminent domain in Georgia
to take your land.
Does that seem right to you?
Florida PSC has to review this pipeline.
Where’s Georgia PSC on this?

FPL PR 26 July 2013,

FPL selects Sabal Trail Transmission and Florida Southeast Connection to build new natural gas pipeline system into Florida,



Florida Power & Light Company today announced that its evaluation of
proposals for additional natural gas transportation capacity
determined that the best, most economical solution for ensuring
Florida’s continued access to the clean, affordable, U.S.-produced
fuel necessary to meet the growing electricity needs of the state’s
residents and businesses is a combination of a natural gas pipeline
and interconnection hub to be built by Sabal Trail Transmission,
LLC, and a second natural gas pipeline to be built by Florida
Southeast Connection, LLC….

Both Sabal Trail and Florida Southeast Connection will be interstate
natural gas pipelines subject to Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission approval and oversight.

In conjunction with today’s public announcement, FPL filed a
petition for prudence review with the Florida Public Service
Commission (PSC). Subject to PSC approval, Continue reading →

Gladiator School cancelled; 2 other CCA prisons closed

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 →

Georgia behind Maryland and Massachusetts in solar power


California and Texas ahead of Georgia in solar power, sure,
but Maryland and Massachusetts,
small and far to the north with less sun?
Does that seem right to you?



According to the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA),

Georgia should be number 5.
Georgia should be moving up the rankings as fast as any state except
maybe Arizona or Colorado, according to

an Arizona State University study of two years ago that said
Georgia was third among state that would
benefit from solar deployment through generating and exporting energy to other states.
The U.S. as a whole

keeps installing far more solar power each year,
but Georgia Power and Southern Company keep holding Georgia back.



It’s great that Valdosta will soon get

2 more megawatts of local solar power.
But while we’re waiting for Georgia Power to slowly get around to doling out

277 megawatts over several years,

New Jersey has 1,000 megawatts already installed.


Georgia is #22, behind #21 Connecticut.
Why do we let that continue?

-jsq

Transparency could have prevented TX fertlizer plant explosion

Has anybody checked on the various agricultural chemical plants around here?
Lack of transparency can kill.



Joshua Schneyer, Ryan McNeill and Janet Roberts wrote for Reuters today,

Texas fertilizer company didn’t heed disclosure rules before blast,

The fertilizer plant that exploded on Wednesday, obliterating part
of a small Texas town and killing at least 14 people, had last year
been storing 1,350 times the amount of ammonium nitrate that would
normally trigger safety oversight by the U.S. Department of Homeland
Security (DHS).

Yet a person familiar with DHS operations said the company that owns
the plant, West Fertilizer, did not tell the agency about the
potentially explosive fertilizer as it is required to do, leaving
one of the principal regulators of ammonium nitrate—which can
also be used in bomb making—unaware of any danger there.

Fertilizer plants and depots must report to the DHS when they hold
400 lb (180 kg) or more of the substance. Filings this year with the
Texas Department of State Health Services, which weren’t shared with
DHS, show the plant had 270 tons of it on hand last year.

There’s more in

the article.

-jsq

13 oil spills in 30 days

As if

three spills in one week wasn’t bad enough,
the spills, leaks, and derailments just keep on coming,
13 of them on 3 continents in just the past 30 days,
as

listed by tcktcktck and illustrated in this graphic.
Meanwhile, a solar spill is still called a nice day.


-jsq

Valdosta Vimeo

I've been nagging Valdosta for years about putting some of their
cable TV station content on the web.
Turns out they are already doing some of that,
which is a step towards acting like a modern metropolitan area.
Received Wednesday via Tim Carroll;
I added the links and the [clarification].



From: Sementha Mathews

Sent: Wednesday, March 13, 2013 11:48 AM

To: Tim Carroll

Subject: RE: "The rest of the story"

Councilman Carroll,

Thank you for the recent phone call. As a result, I will research
the Austin, Tx media practices to see if they can be implemented in
any way here at Metro 17. We used to include a council wrap segment
in each show, and I'll ask

Shemeeka [Johnson, Valdosta Channel 17 Media Coordinator]
why we took that out. But we
can easily add that back in.

City of Austin posts

Continue reading →

Speakupaustin: a major MSA and local government transparency

The

Austin reporting program is in addition to
the posting a City Council agenda more than a week in advance


(here’s the 28 Feb 2013 agenda already on 16 Feb 2013)
and
including the entire board packets

with working papers and other backup documentation
with the minutes.
Austin

televises and webcasts its meetings live,
with close captioning and transcripts online.
They don’t limit the number of citizens who can speak,
or the subjects they can speak on, and they televise and webcast
all of them as well.
Plus citizens can speak on specific agenda issues,
and Austin

has an online forum for citizen suggestions on which citizens can vote
on the ones they like.

Is there still back-door politics in Austin? For sure.
But you can see a lot more of what is going on in Austin
than they can about the local governments here,
and citizens have a lot more input.

If Valdosta and Lowndes County
(and Hahira and Lake Park and Dasher and Remerton)
want to be treated like a major MSA,
they might consider following Austin’s lead.
Instead of decreasing citizen input by exiling
all citizen speakers to the end of a meeting and limiting the number
who can speak, while not even putting board packets online,
consider continually increasing local government
transparency and citizen input.

-jsq

Energy efficiency rebates, Austin, Texas



The central city of a major MSA,
Austin, Texas, publishes its own video reporting on
local issues, like this one on local energy efficiency.

AustinEnergy has brought back its best offer ever deal,
which allows customers to receive both rebates and a loan
to make energy efficiency improvements.
The rebates can total as much as $3200,
and can cover as much as a third of the cost of the improvements,
including the air conditioning unit.
Remaining costs after the rebates can be financed through a
low interest loan through the Austin Credit Union.

The best offer ever is financed in part by a $10 million
better buildings grant from the U.S. Department of Energy….

Here’s

the video:

Continue reading →

Rooftop solar: the most direct route to clean energy industries


Austin vs. San Antonio in solar power
Around here I hear local leaders say “we’ll never be Austin.”
Well, Austin may be letting San Antonio pass Austin as far as rooftop solar
and the jobs that generates.
It’s not a matter of size or pre-existing advantages.
It’s a matter of political will.
Do we have that will here?

TexasVox
wrote a white paper in February 2012,

Solar Austin: Rooftop Solar & Job Creation,

…the most direct route to attracting and encouraging the
development of clean energy industries is through the


the scale of future development will be orders of
magnitude greater than what has occurred to date.

mass deployment of local rooftop solar, which is probably why solar has
by far the most significant presence of any clean energy generation
technology in Austin.

But the paper’s point is that Austin is falling short.
Look at the graph:
Austin seems to have settled for linear growth in solar power,
while San Antonio gets it about
compound growth.
As San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro
said in 2011, solar power is in

Continue reading →