We don’t have to look to far Texas for examples of where to put solar panels. Let’s try Atlanta.
Next to the downtown Marriott in Atlanta:
That’s Gretchen in the center as reference human for scale.
Google map picture:
Continue readingThe Industrial Authority meets this evening at 5:30 in their usual location. It seems to be mostly about business parks this time, plus these interesting items:
Director’s Report –Andrea Schruijer
Strategic Plan response
Update on Personal Policy and Procedure Manual
Maybe they’re serious about input from the community for their strategic plan process.
Their website still has sidebar error messages like this:
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But it’s fixed enough that I could retrieve the agenda. This time they do not list what any of the expansion projects or potential projects are. They also still don’t say what the various executive sessions were for; I think real estate or personnel are the usual two reasons allowed by state law.
Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority
Agenda
Tuesday, March 20, 2012 5:30 p.m.
Industrial Authority Conference Room
2110 N. Patterson Street
Two former big-time politicos join the fight against CWIP.
Melissa Roberts wrote for CBS Atlanta yesterday, Unlikely duo challenges Ga. utility over rates,
The unlikely duo of ex-Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes and former Republican House Speaker Glenn Richardson are heading to court to challenge Georgia Power over a surcharge they say has cost ratepayers as much as $100 million.
They're going after Construction Work in Progress (CWIP)!
Jim Galloway in the AJC yesterday noted the irony,
The gentleman knows of what he speaks, and that is only one of the ironies here. The legislation that has allowed Georgia Power, for the last 15 months, to charge ratepayers for financial costs associated with the construction of two new nuclear power plants, was passed in 2009 during Richardson’s final session as the second- most powerful man in the Capitol.
Maybe he can help undo the harm he helped do. Ditto Roy Barnes, who got coal-plant-building Cobb EMC former head Dwight Brown off on a technicality.
Melissa Roberts wrote:
The lawsuit contends the utility is charging sales tax on the finance surcharge and the franchise tax paid to cities. Richardson said in a phone interview he and Barnes are two "Davids against the Goliath."
Add those two Davids to the two Davids of Savannah, Drs. Sidney Smith and Pat Godbey and their Lower Rates for Customers LLC. Add a few more thousand Davids around the state paying their CWIP in separate checks with objections.
New Hampshire banned CWIP and their nuke-building utility went bankrupt. Missouri banned CWIP. Iowa is working on banning CWIP. Georgia can ban CWIP, too. Watch out Goliath!
-jsq
What if the Industrial Authority supported industry that had a business model, brought jobs, and had the support of the community? It can happen, and already has!
Citizen Carol wrote for Texas Vox 6 January 2012, Austin Energy drought proofs its energy with new Webberville Solar Project,
Public Citizen says kudos to the City of Austin and Austin Energy for their vision and efforts in completing this project. Given that the State Climatologist is warning us that Texas can expect up to 5 more years of the current drought cycle, this project came just in time to help provide our community with drought–proof electricity during the peak use times — that will come in handy next summer.
Remember we already discovered this right here in Valdosta and Lowndes County? The Wiregrass Solar commissioning was a popular event, with many critics of the Industrial Authority lavishly praising it for the solar plant. Nobody complained about living near a solar installation. How about some more clean industry?
-jsq
Received today. -jsq
Too often there are incidents of this nature that go unreported while American Citizens feels that the United States Justice Department knows about these types of incidents but little to nothing seems to end these alleged incidents of Americans CONSTITUTIONAL Rights Violation? But then who cares until they need a young man to volunteer to serve on foreign battlefields for the rights of others.
-George Boston Rhynes
Here’s a playlist:
Taser incident in Boston, Georgia
Video by George Boston Rhynes for bostongbr on YouTube (K.V.C.I.).
I don’t know any more about it than what’s in these videos, and in the writeups by George; see below. -jsq
Continue reading
Citizen Carol wrote for Texas Vox 6 January 2012,
Austin Energy drought proofs its energy with new Webberville Solar Project
How about
on the proposed coal plant site in Ben Hill County?
A number of years ago, the City of Austin purchased this land
planning to install a new coal-fired power plant. When those plans
fell through, a landfill was proposed for the site that now boasts
280 acres of solar panels with a view of downtown Austin along its
horizon.
Of course, it doesn’t have to be that big, or all in one place. How about on top of a landfill? How about on the cotton fields next to Valdosta’s Sallas Mahone Elementary School? Energy to air condition the school instead of drifting pesticides, and profit to the landowner! How about at the airport? At the mall parking lot? On top of the new county palace? On the warehouses in Hahira?
-jsq
5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners,
which is
seven times our incarceration rate of 40 years ago,
while the crime rate is about the same,
and Georgia has
1 in 13 adults in the prison system (jail, prison, probation, or parole.
We can’t afford that.
The money we waste locking people up could be sending people to college
or paying teachers.
And the root cause is still the
failed war on drugs,
which is also one of the biggest problems with human rights around the world.
LEAP wrote 16 March 2012, Human Rights is a Foreign Concept in the UN’s “War on Drugs”
“Fundamentally, the three UN prohibitionist treaties are incompatible to human rights. We can have human rights or drug war, but not both,” said Maria Lucia Karam, a retired judge from Brazil and a board member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP).
Richard Van Wickler, currently a jail superintendent in New Hampshire, adds, “I suppose it’s not shocking that within the context of a century-long bloody ‘war on drugs’ the idea of human rights is a foreign concept. Our global drug prohibition regime puts handcuffs on millions of people every year while even the harshest of prohibitionist countries say that drug abuse is a health issue. What other medical problems do we try to solve with imprisonment and an abandonment of human rights?”
Good point.
We don’t lock up people for drinking. We only lock them up for endangering other people while drinking. And we tax alcohol sales and generate revenue for the state. Let’s do the same with drugs: legalize, regulate, and tax. That’s what we did with alcohol in 1933, and it’s time to do the same with other drugs.
-jsq
Harvey Wasserman wrote Friday for EcoWatch, Nuclear Power’s Green Mountain Grassroots Demise,
The accelerating revolution in renewables has allowed solar, windWe can end CWIP in Georgia. It will benefit Georgia Power and the EMCs as well as all the rest of us when we stop wasting tax and customer dollars on boondoggles like Plant Vogtle or biomass or private prisons and get on with clean, profitable, job-creating renewable energy in Georgia: wind off the coast and sun inland.and other green sources to outstrip atomic reactors in cost, time to build, ecological impact and safety. As billions pour into Solartopian sources, private investment in atomic energy has all but disappeared—except where there are massive taxpayer subsidies.
Even that’s not enough. In 2011, President Obama handed $8.33 billion in federal loan guarantees to the builders of two reactors at Georgia’s Vogtle. But Peach State ratepayers are already being soaked for billions more in pre-payments, and the cost of the project is soaring. A parallel financial disaster looms at the Robinson site in neighboring South Carolina. Though the industry assumes these four reactors will eventually be finished, economic realities may say otherwise.
Cost estimates for new nukes have been soaring even before construction begins. Even with federal money, the builders still demand that state ratepayers foot the bill as the process proceeds, meaning consumers are on the hook for multiple billions even if the reactors never open. Pitched battles over this Construction Work in Progress scam have already been won by consumers in Missouri and are being fought in Iowa and elsewhere. As the years of building drag on, costs will escalate while renewables continue to become cheaper. Sooner or later, construction is likely to stop, as it did at numerous projects in the 1970s and 1980s which were never finished.
-jsq
Eames Yates wrote for WCTV Friday, Plans For New Prison Scrapped,
To people who mostly don’t live here now and mostly wouldn’t want to live here then, while driving away better businesses; she didn’t mention any of that, or the other problems with the whole private prison bad business.Schruijer went on to say “It would have been a huge economic impact. There were about 400 jobs associated with the project with approximately $150 million dollars in capital investment.”
Those four hundred jobs that the prison would have created, on average, would have payed between $40,000 and $50,000 dollars eah.
That picture of Ms. Schruijer is hosted on the LAKE website, by the way. The VLCIA website is still broken, a week after I first pointed it out. Is this how the Industrial Authority plans to do PR, still promoting yet another failed Brad Lofton boondoggle while not making anything positive available on their own website?
-jsq
Here’s their PR, Austin Energy Activates 30 MW Solar Farm,
AUSTIN, Texas , Jan. 6, 2012 /PRNewswire/ — Austin Energy along with Austin City Mayor Lee Leffingwell , and Village ofWebberville Mayor Hector Gonzales today announced the activation of a 30 megawatt (MW) solar power plant located within the Village of Webberville, Texas . The activation of the power plant marks the first utility-scale solar deployment for Austin Energy and helps bring the utility one step closer to achieving a 35% renewable energy mix by 2020. It is the largest active solar project of any public power utility in the country, the largest active project in Texas and among the largest of all operating solar projects in America. The project was activated on December 20, 2011
The key was a PPA:
The utility-scale solar project was made possible through a 25-year solar power purchase agreement in which Austin Energy will purchase the energy at a fixed rate along with the renewable energy credits.In Georgia, PPAs can be made with municipal governments, universities, companies, or even individuals, if SB 401 passes.
An opportunity for EMCs: Continue reading