Tag Archives: Valdosta

2012 Drought more expensive than Hurricane Sandy

You thought Hurricane Sandy was bad? You were right, but economically, the ongoing drought is worse economically. But we already know a much brighter path.

Weather Underground founder Dr. Jeff Masters wrote 16 November 2012, Lessons from 2012: Droughts, not Hurricanes, are the Greater Danger,

Sandy’s damages of perhaps $50 billion will likely be overshadowed by the huge costs of the great drought of 2012.

By Dr. Masters’ estimate, the 2012 drought will cost more than half again as much as Hurricane Sandy.

Also notice Hurricane Katrina still at the top of that table, with almost three times the economic damage and far more deaths than Hurricane Sandy. We could have gotten the message back in 2005, but hey, those were only poor southern people, so who, in for example New York City, really cared? Yes, I know many of us did and many of you actively helped, but I’m sure you see my point that when greater New York gets the storm, suddenly the country pays attention and a lot more people want to find out how to keep that from happening again.

What’s that drought look like for us here in Georgia at the moment, according to U.S. Drought Monitor?

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Same old agenda at VLCIA tonight @ VLCIA 2012-12-18

According to their website (but curiously not their facebook page):

VLCIA logo The Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority’s Regular Monthly Meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, December 18, 2012, 5:30 PM at the Industrial Authority Conference Room, 2110 N. Patterson Street.

I mentioned to a VLCIA board member Friday that the agendas never changed, except for the dates for minutes of previous meetings and of financial statements. I really must apologize! This one also differs from last month’s agenda in three more ways:

old Executive Director’s Report-Allan Ricketts on behalf of Andrea Schruijer
new Executive Director’s Report- Andrea Schruijer
old Adjourn General Meeting into Executive Session
old Adjourn Executive Session into General Meeting
old Adjoujrn General Meeting
new Adjourn General Meeting

That’s right: apparently Andrea Schruijer is in town this time, there’s no scheduled Executive Session, and a typo is fixed.

However, they didn’t change any of the lists of existing or prospective businesses, or meetings attended, or changes to the website, or acreage owned. Because the agenda never lists any of those things, nor anything else of substance. While that sort of secrecy was perhaps useful in trying to sneak in a private prison and a biomass plant, I wonder if it really helps attract high tech business like Richmond County or attract a solar park like Decatur County?

Here’s the agenda.

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Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority
Agenda
Tuesday, December 18, 2012 5:30 p.m.
Industrial Authority Conference Room
2110 N. Patterson Street
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Are Augusta and Richmond County special in transparency?

So why does Augusta have the second highest high tech job growth in the country? I can only speculate, but local government transparency could be a factor. If you had a high tech company and were looking to open an office, would you go for a place where you couldn't tell what the local governments were up to, or one where you could easily find out? Augusta's combined City Council and County Commission meetings (it's a consolidated government) are on video, online. Their agendas are available in either HTML or PDF, with attachments.

Here's an example, their 5 December 2012 Commission Meeting. It includes a proposed amendment to their land subdivision code. The actual proposed ordinance is linked right into the agenda so everybody can see it.

And yes, they link attachments into their agendas before their meetings; here's Augusta's agenda for their meeting tomorrow 18 December 2012, already with attachments, such as this one about a zoning exception, which was apparently submitted on a standard agenda submittal form, and approved by the Clerk of Commission.

Meanwhile, the outgoing Lowndes County Chairman complained the Chamber of Commerce hadn't read a proposed zoning code change even though that change is not linked into the agenda (nor is anything else) and last year the same Chairman said no drafts would be published. Tuesday last week, Lowndes County Commissioners passed changes to the solid waste ordinance and to the alcohol ordinance that voters and taxpayers and business owners did not get to see before the Commission voted on them. Those ordinances seem to be on the county website now that it's too late to provide input on them: alcohol and waste. Both ordinances were revised with no public hearings. And the Chairman even forgot to hold a scheduled public hearing on special tax lighting districts. Oh, and they apparently now have property owners paying on almost $9 million in bonds for a county palace that only two years ago they said was already completely paid off out of sales taxes.

If you had a high tech company and were looking to open an office, Continue reading →

Decatur County already went from private prison to solar park

Decatur County, that’s turning an industrial park into a solar park; why is that county familiar? Because it’s the other county that thought it was getting a CCA private prison last year!

Decatur County has already moved on from that boondoggle that would have prisoners competing with local workers while not increasing local employment. Decatur County is already well along towards a solar park that could bring “400 hundred thousand a year in tax revenue”. Has our Industrial Authority got anything in negotiations for a solar park? How about our Airport Authority? And what is Georgia Power doing to help?

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West Point aiming for net zero energy use

U.S. Army is serious about solar, installing solar panels as a “very visible and a very recognizable part of our renewable energy initiative that can immediately click with the general public” as it makes its military academy net zero, while encouraging cadets to become renewable energy leaders. Hm, sounds like Decatur County with its solar industrial park and what we could do here with solar Lowndes High.

Mike Strasser wrote Army PR 29 November 2012, Solar panels deliver new energy to West Point’s Net Zero initiative,

The installation of solar panels on the roof of the Lichtenberg Tennis Center—780 panels, to be exact—in recent weeks represents West Point’s continuing efforts to achieve energy sustainability.

Since becoming a Net Zero Energy pilot installation last April, West Point has been making strides toward the ultimate goal of producing as much energy as it uses by 2020. According to an environmental assessment for the U.S. Army Environmental Command and West Point Garrison, the installation currently generates less than .02 percent of the energy it consumes from renewable sources. Matt Talaber, Department of Public Works engineer and director, said the solar panels will be a step in the right direction.

“The solar panels are very visible and a very recognizable part of our renewable energy initiative that can immediately click with the general public,” Talaber said. “It’s a positive image that shows West Point is interested in renewable energy and is working on its Net Zero energy goals.”

And they’re also improving conservation and efficiency. Plus this:

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AZ invites CCA to help get more customers in School to Prison Pipepline

We could have slipped down this slippery slope with that proposed CCA private prison, down to where Casa Grande Arizona is, inviting CCA’s guards and dogs into our schools to collect our children as private prison customers.

Sadhbh Walshe wrote for the Guardian 13 December 2012, Arizona funnels business to CCA through its school-to-prison pipeline: Casa Grande invited a private prison firm to help make a high-school marijuana bust. Can you spot the conflict of interest?

Drug sweeps of schools are not uncommon occurrences in the recent past in America, much to the chagrin of civil rights advocates, who see such sweeps as an efficient means of diverting certain kids to prison — in some cases, even before they make it to adolescence, via the much-criticized “school-to-prison pipeline”. What was unusual about this particular raid, however, is that, among the team of law enforcement personnel and canines put together by the local Casa Grande police department, there were prison guards employed by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the country’s largest for-profit prison company, which owns and operates several prisons in the area. CCA was also kind enough to provide their sniffer dogs for the raid.

What’s even more unusual about this is that pretty much nobody in a position of authority in and around Casa Grande seems to think there’s anything wrong with that.

That’s where “jobs, jobs, jobs” with no consideration of the consequences leads you. Some jobs are not worth having. Private prison jobs are among them.

The state of Georgia spends a billion dollars a year locking people up, many of them for minor drug offenses, and around 85% of them for drug-related offenses. What if instead we spent a fraction of that money on drug counselling and mental health care, and the rest on public education? Then we’d have healthier people more prepared for real jobs.

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PS: Owed to Dante Acevedo.

Renewables are Winning, Nukes are Dead, and Coal is Crashing

Somebody is willing to read the sunshine writing: Renewables are Winning, Nukes are Dead and Coal is Crashing, as Kathleen Rogers and Danny Kennedy wrote for EcoWatch 14 Dec 2012.

As I wrote back in April when formerly coal-plotting Cobb EMC went solar:

Coal is dead. Nuclear is going down. Solar will eat the lunch of utilities that don’t start generating it.

Can Georgia Power and Southern Company (SO) read that handwriting on the wall? They can’t fight Moore’s Law, which has steadily brought the cost of solar photovoltaic (PV) energy down for thirty years now, and shows no signs of stopping. This is the same Moore’s Law that has put a computer in your pocket more powerful than a computer that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in 1982 and was used by an entire company. Solar PV costs dropped 50% last year. Already all the new U.S. electric capacity installed this September was solar and wind. As this trend continues, solar will become so much more cost-effective than any fossil or nuclear fuel power that nobody will be able to ignore it.

Rogers and Kennedy explained this phenomenon:

The seismic shift in how we all use cell phones and mobile technology to access the internet almost snuck up on the incumbent technologies and the monopolies that made money selling us landline telephones and a crappy service. Now, we’re all using apps on smartphones all of the time. So too, the shift to a scaled, solar-powered future built around the modular technology at the heart of solar power—the photovoltaic solar cell—will come as a surprise to many. We call it the solar ascent, and it is happening every day in a million ways.

Will SO and Georgia Power continue to prop up that 1973 legal wall that inhibits solar financing in Georgia? Companies and even economic development authorities are starting to find ways around it, and of course there’s Georgia Solar Utilities (GaSU) trying to wedge into the law as a utility. After Hurricane Sandy, rooftop solar for grid outage independence has suddenly hit the big time (Austin Energy caught onto that back in 2003). The U.S. military got solar and renewable energy back in Afghanistan and are now doing it bigtime everywhere.

SO and Georgia Power can try to ignore Continue reading →

Industrial park from green grass to a green solar future: Decatur County

Our Industrial Authority is in favor of solar business now; what if they seeded some of their industrial parks with solar panels like Decatur County is doing? They think it will make them look like a progressive county. What do we think?

Ty Wilson wrote for WTXL 7 Dec 2012, A solar park is coming to the Decatur County Industrial Park,

The Decatur County Industrial park will go from having green grass to having a green future.

A Lenexa, Kansas company is building a solar farm at the Decatur County Industrial Park.

The Decatur County Industrial park will go from having green grass to having a green future.

Keith Lyle is the chairman of the Bainbridge Decatur Development Authority, he says, “We are just extremely excited to have this come for the community.”

Decatur County Solar Park in solar Megawatt context And, it’s private investment!

Trade Winds Energy is leasing at least 100 acres to put in solar panels at ten thousand dollars a year.

Company executives says they will invest 17 million dollars into the project.

Lyle says, “This will add from the tax aspect a significant revenue stream. When it is all said and done you are looking at a taxable amount of 40 million is assets. On the project that is 400 hundred thousand a year in tax revenue.”

Trade Wind Energy doesn’t list this project yet (and all the projects they do list are wind projects), but if we take a rule of thumb Continue reading →

Rooftop solar for grid outage independence

Solar power can bring for energy independence, not just from foreign countries, also from the grid during storms and other outages.

Inspired by the need to deal with downed power lines in New York and New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy, David Crane and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote for NYTimes 12 Dec 2012, Solar Panels for Every Home,

Solar photovoltaic technology can significantly reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and our dependence on the grid. Electricity-producing photovoltaic panels installed on houses, on the roofs of warehouses and big box stores and over parking lots can be wired so that they deliver power when the grid fails.

Solar panels have dropped in price by 80 percent in the past five years and can provide electricity at a cost that is at or below the current retail cost of grid power in 20 states, including many of the Northeast states. So why isn’t there more of a push for this clean, affordable, safe and inexhaustible source of electricity?

First, the investor-owned utilities that depend on the existing system for their profits have little economic interest in promoting a technology that empowers customers to generate their own power. Second, state regulatory agencies and local governments impose burdensome permitting and siting requirements that unnecessarily raise installation costs.

I can tell you by experience that solar panels on the roof (with batteries) can supply power when the grid is out.

In regulatory-captured Georgia, the big impediment to solar is financing, because of 1973 Territorial Electric Service Act. When will Southern Company and Georgia Power admit their boondoogle on the Savannah River has failed and get on with conservation, efficiency, wind, and solar power?

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Augusta high tech job growth: second in the country

What is Augusta doing that attracts so many high tech jobs?

Orlando Montoya wrote for GPB News 7 December 2012, Augusta High Tech Ranks Nationally,

A national group working to promote entrepreneurship says Augusta has the second highest growth rate of high tech jobs in the past five years.

Only Boise, Idaho grew tech jobs faster.

San Francisco based Engine Advocacy says between 2006 and 2011, Augusta increased its technology sector jobs by 81%.

City officials credit the area’s low cost of living.

If that was the only key, Lowndes County and Valdosta MSA would lead the country…. What else?

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