Category Archives: Coal

The extraordinary negative side of coal mining —Jane Osborn @ LCC 13 September 2011

Jane Osborn talked about two health issues: the downside of coal mining, and no institutions for mental health.
…also related to the solar discussion that was begun yesterday, I think a piece we don’t talk about very often is the extraordinary negative side of coal mining. We are taking the tops off of mountains in Appalachia, leaving pristine streams clogged with the debris and the toxic waste of that. So coal is not just the price you see that we pay for it. Coal is seen in the price of people still dying of black lung, every time a mine collapses, and every time another mountain is taken down. I would guess if they were taking mountains down in North Georgia, we’d be fussing about it.
She said she has been a social worker for 33 years. She said starting June the DBHDD there would be a new service she recommended the county advertise on its website.
As of June 1st no person in the state of Georgia with a developmental disability may be placed in an institution.
The new service is a 24/7 toll free number to call for help.

Here’s the video:


The extraordinary negative side of coal mining —Jane Osborn @ LCC 13 September 2011
Regular Session, Lowndes County Commission (LCC),
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 13 September 2011.
Videos by Gretchen Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.

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Coal-planning Cobb EMC board to meet

Cobb EMC to hold first member meeting since spate of legal problems. Its current directors still want to build a coal plant in Ben Hill County.

Kim Isaza wrote for MDJonline.com today, Sides set for first EMC meeting: Date set for Sept. 17, but Cobb Superior court judge must first grant approval

Pending approval from Judge Stephen Schuster, the first meeting of Cobb EMC members in nearly three years will convene at 10:15 a.m. Sept. 17.

At that meeting, members will decide two issues: whether to allow voting by mail-in ballots at future elections, and whether to amend the electric cooperative’s bylaws to limit director compensation to a daily rate while also prohibiting future directors from being paid retirement benefits. Previously vested benefits would not be affected.

And look which one the directors really don’t like: Continue reading →

“about as fruitful as trying to squeeze information out of the Kremlin”

Which organization was this judge referring to?
Schuster told the directors that he thought [that organization] was supplying “vague” information and he directed that henceforth the sides meet monthly in his office for updates on the liquidation process. In short, Schuster is learning first hand — just like members, the media and the public at large have learned — that prying information out of [that organization] is usually about as fruitful as trying to squeeze information out of the Kremlin.
No, not that city council! No, not that county commission! Not even the state board of corrections. (Although some of them might want to try that bureaucratic shoe on to see if it fits.) Here’s who: Continue reading →

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 →

Georgia officials are getting it about solar

Chuck Eaton, Georgia Public Service Commissioner, moderating a panel of Georgia’s Policy Makers at Southern Solar Summit said
Solar is great for diversity, independence, research, and business.
He said that until recently he had discounted solar, but now he had seen it. Continue reading →

San Antonio promises to shut down a coal plant

We could do something like this. We’ve already made a start with Wiregrass Solar.

San Antonio, the Clean-Energy City? Look out Austin, SA Mayor Julian Castro promises to shut-down a coal plant by 2018.

At an event this afternoon at UT-San Antonio, Mayor Julian Castro announced a suite of green energy projects that he said would position San Antonio as the nation’s “recognized leader in clean energy technology” and help fulfill his aggressive environmental goals.

Most notably, Castro and leaders from CPS Energy, the city-owned utility, pledged to shut down one of its coal-fired power plants 15 years ahead of schedule. By 2018, the city would mothball the 871-megawatt J.T. Deely Power Plant — a bold move in a growing state that’s seemingly addicted to coal.

So what are they going to use for energy? Continue reading →

VSU Faculty Senate passes anti-biomass resolution

Karen Noll reported on WACE’s facebook page that the VSU Faculty Senate passed a resolution Thursday 19 May 2011 that biomass will not be considered renewable for VSU’s climate commitment goal.

Why? Because leading medical associations have identified woody biomass incineration as increasing risks of “a variety of illnesses, some life-threatening”, because biomass incineration produces more CO2, NOX, and fine particulates than existing coal plants, and because it “may lead to unsustainable forestry practices and a net increase in global greenhouse gas emissions”.

Who proposed this? Continue reading →

Americans overwhelmingly want clean energy and environmental protection —Pew

Climate Progress points out that a new Pew poll, “Beyond Red vs. Blue: The Political Typology”, shows that Public support for alternative energy transcends political barriers:
71% of Americans believe “This country should do whatever it takes to protect the environment.” And 59% believe that “strongly.”
Quoting from Pew’s summary:
In light of this diversity it is interesting to note a couple of areas where almost all of these groups agree. The first is on support for alternative energy. Overall, the public prioritizes developing alternative energy over expanding oil, coal, and natural gas by a 63-29 margin. And, as shown in the chart below, seven of Pew’s eight active typology groups support this position, including a whopping 40-point margin among the Main Street Republican group. Only the staunch conservatives (9 percent of the public) dissent from the rest. Conservatives usually act like progressive ideas have no purchase in “their” part of the political spectrum. These data suggest otherwise.
And no, conservatives are not the political type the south has the most disproportional percentage of: those would be Hard-Pressed Democrats and Disaffecteds.

And no, by “alternative energy” people don’t mean polluting biomass: 63% of Americans say “EPA needs to do more to hold polluters accountable and protect the air and water”. What Americans want is clean renewable energy: solar, wind, and hydrogen.

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Conversation for jobs —Cristobal Serran-Pagan @ VCC 7 April 2011

Dr. Serran-Pagan suggests we have a conversation among all types of people and do the math. Let’s put the money where it will produce jobs. Solar, wind, why haven’t we been doing it? Real clean renewable sources of energy. He brings up the water the biomass plant would use.
Water is precious. Air is precious. Oil, coal, is not precious. Biomass is not precious. We have plenty of good clean, renewable sources of energy. Let’s do that…. and get rid of old models, and let’s try to do what is right for community, for our economy, and for public interest.

Here’s the video:


Conversation for jobs —Cristobal Serran-Pagan @ VCC 7 April 2011
Regular monthly meeting of the Valdosta City Council (VCC),
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 7 April 2011,
Videos by Gretchen Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.

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Big oil tax subsidies: $9 billion / year —API

After last night’s Valdosta City Council meeting, someone told me he thought all renewable energy sources required subsidies, and that was the problem. Well, I think the real problem is the much larger subsidies to big oil.

Dan Froomkin wrote in huffpo How The Oil Lobby Greases Washington’s Wheels:

Despite astronomical profits during what have been lean years for most everyone else, the oil and gas industry continues to benefit from massive, multi-billion dollar taxpayer subsidies. Opinion polling shows the American public overwhelmingly wants those subsidies eliminated.
That’s at least $4 billion a year to big oil while Congress debates cutting Social Security and Medicare and maybe shutting down the government. According to the American Petroleum Institute (API), Continue reading →