Category Archives: Renewable Energy

ALEC, private prisons, fossil fuels, and charter schools

It’s good to see someone trying a coordinated strategy for something good in multiple states, as Our Children’s Trust is doing for air as a public trust. We already knew going to multiple states at once works, because ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange, gets reactionary results that way.

How does ALEC do it? By

So once again, it’s refreshing to see somebody successfully try multiple states for something worthwhile!

The above ALEC projects are just some I’ve run across while researching local topics. It often seems as if every rock I turn over has the ALEC millipede scurrying around under it. Far more about ALEC is available through ALEC Exposed.

ALEC Exposed has a list of companies that have dumped ALEC recently. Georgia Power’s parent The Southern Company and UPS are still not on that list. You can help. Let them know you want them to dump ALEC!

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New research shows Natural Gas far more dangerous for climate stability —Seth Gunning

Received yesterday on U.S. CO2 emissions lowest in 20 years: that's good and bad: natural gas is methane, after all. -jsq

Yet another comprehensive article. I might also add that one of the major down-falls (if not the most significant) of large-scale conversions to natural gas is the resources lifecycle methane emissions.

As your readers likely know, Methane is about twenty times as 'potent' a greenhouse gas as Carbon Dioxide. That is to say, it is far more efficient at trapping heat then Co2. So, less methane has a far greater impact on climate disruption then more Co2.

Natural Gas, from the point of combustion, releases about half the amount of Co2 released from burning coal, and about 30% of what's released in burning oil. To keep the benefits of reduced Co2 levels when switching from coal to natural gas, natural gas wells and transport lines must leak less then 2% of methane into the atmosphere. Recent research from Cornell is showing that Fracking wells are regularly releasing more then 4%, and often as much as 8% —far exceeding the 2% threshold— and thus making Natural Gas a far more dangerous resource for climate stability.

Tom Zeller Jr. wrote for the NYTimes 11 April 2011, Studies Say Natural Gas Has Its Own Problems

-Seth Gunning

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U.S. CO2 emissions lowest in 20 years: that’s good and bad

The good news: because utilities such as Southern Company are switching away from coal U.S. emissions of CO2 are the lowest they’ve been in 20 years. The bad news: they’re switching to natural gas, which not only still emits carbon dioxide, it pollutes groundwater through fracking, requires a lot of groundwater to do the fracking in the first place, and then uses more groundwater for cooling. But the further good news is cheaper energy sources drive out expensive ones, and wind and solar are already cheaper than nuclear and coal, and solar is already cheaper than natural gas. Oh, and solar and wind emit no CO2.

Kevin Begos write for AP yesterday, AP IMPACT: CO2 emissions in US drop to 20-year low

“There’s a very clear lesson here. What it shows is that if you make a cleaner energy source cheaper, you will displace dirtier sources,” said Roger Pielke Jr., a climate expert at the University of Colorado.

While conservation efforts, the lagging economy and greater use of renewable energy are factors in the CO2 decline, the drop-off is due mainly to low-priced natural gas, the agency said.

A frenzy of shale gas drilling in the Northeast’s Marcellus Shale and in Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana has caused the wholesale price of natural gas to plummet from $7 or $8 per unit to about $3 over the past four years, making it cheaper to burn than coal for a given amount of energy produced. As a result, utilities are relying more than ever on gas-fired generating plants.

Both government and industry experts said the biggest surprise is how quickly the electric industry turned away from coal. In 2005, coal was used to produce about half of all the electricity generated in the U.S. The Energy Information Agency said that fell to 34 percent in March, the lowest level since it began keeping records nearly 40 years ago.

And that’s why Southern Company (SO) turned towards natural gas: it’s cheaper! SO still prefers nuclear and coal before gas, as SO CEO Thomas A. Fanning keeps reminding us. But even SO couldn’t ignore “the revolution in shale gas”, which is cheaper prices through fracking. Solar PV costs dropped 50% last year alone. How long can SO ignore that?

“Natural gas is not a long-term solution to the CO2 problem,” Pielke warned….

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Another home with wind power

When we arrived, the wind company was tuning the stay wires on the windmill at the home of Karl and Clare Kuntz in western New York State.

Another home with wind power
Karl and Clare Kuntz, Pavillion, Genesee County, New York
Videos by John S. Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE).

Clare said the wind company is Sustainable Energy Developments. She added,

Sign You can put your money in the mattress or in the bank, and get about the same appreciation. Or you can put it in wind or solar and feel good about it.

Karl said it would take about fifteen years to pay back the wind investment, and meanwhile they get more power than they use, and still will after it’s all paid for. He remarked that the wind company has also started doing solar energy, because solar now costs half as much as wind. And that’s in windy western New York, 1000 miles north of sunny south Georgia.

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There is something you can do

Anybody who has tried to do much of anything around here has run into this phrase:

There’s nothing you can do.

I was reminded of that when I read this, from the Economist 12 May 2012, Hope springs a trap,

This hopelessness manifests itself in many ways. One is a sort of pathological conservatism, where people forgo even feasible things with potentially large benefits for fear of losing the little they already possess.

The article expands on that idea:

Development economists have long surmised that some very poor people may remain trapped in poverty because even the largest investments they are able to make, whether eating a few more calories or working a bit harder on their minuscule businesses, are too small to make a big difference. So getting out of poverty seems to require a quantum leap—vastly more food, a modern machine, or an employee to mind the shop. As a result, they often forgo even the small incremental investments of which they are capable: a bit more fertiliser, some more schooling or a small amount of saving.

It may seem that the article is about the poorest of people, but that “pathological conservatism” could as easily apply to the hopelessness many people seem to have about ever getting solar panels on their own roofs, or to attracting enough business to our area to employ our high school and college graduates, or that businesses will ever come to the south side.

Yet the point of the article is that field studies by MIT economist Esther Duflo show Continue reading →

Windmills near Wales NY 11 August 2012

So many they need their own power substation. And there’s corn growing in the same fields.

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Pictures by John S. Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE), Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 11 August 2012.

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Vermont protests against wind vs. nuclear

Compare 6 arrested of about 25 demonstrators against Green Mountain Power’s wind energy project on Lowell Mountain vs. 130 arrested of a thousand protesting in March against the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant.

Also notice what they were protesting. The location on Lowell Mountain, as damaging the mountain top and being unsightly, plus:

“I feel like they [GMP] only went through the public process to a point, and the process is flawed,” said Young, a self-employed logger and farmer from Westfield. “Community members don’t have the resources to have a strong voice. It’s complex, expensive, and lawyers don’t want to do it.”

At Vermont Yankee, the protests were against radioactive leaks, nuclear waste, and this:

Yankee’s initial 40-year license expired Wednesday. The plant is still running, under a 20-year extension from the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission—despite a vote by the state senate not to allow the plant to continue operating in Vermont.

A common theme is lack of democratic oversight, although even that seems greater in degree for Vermont Yankee. We are familiar with that issue in Georgia, where there’s an election going on for Public Service Commissioners and legislators.

Another common theme is that it’s complex and expensive, which is indeed an issue for big wind projects. Power companies like them as big as they can build them because that fits their corporate bureaucracy. They can instead be smaller and distributed. Nuclear power plants, on the other hand, are always big, bureaucratic, and expensive.

While I thoroughly sympathize with the Lowell Mountain protesters about the mountain top issues, I don’t see anything about them protesting the risk of a wind spill. Risks of nuclear radioactive contamination are very real, and are among the Vermont Yankee protesters’ main issues. Wind off the coast of Georgia would not have that problem.

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The reality of the solar industry —Michael Noll

Received Friday on Plant Vogtle water use. -jsq

Please note a recent article in the New York Times about the best alternative to nuclear power in Georgia: The Secret to Solar Power By Jeff Himmelman, 9 August 2012.

To quote from the article:

“… the reality of the [solar] industry — as evidenced by the enormous investments that companies like Google and Bank of America are making in residential solar power — is that it has rapidly become a smart, practical and profitable investment.”
Michael G. Noll, President
Wiregrass Activists for Clean Energy (WACE)

When will Southern Company & Georgia Power finally wake up? —Michael G. Noll

Received today on Plant Vogtle water use. -jsq

Energy projects such as biomass plants, coal firing plants, and nuclear power plants waste enormous amounts of water. The once proposed 40MW biomass plant in Valdosta would have consumed 800,000 gallons of water DAILY. Considering that for years now we are experiencing record drought conditions and heat waves in the US, this should make everyone’s hair stand up on the back of their necks. (For more information see “Electricity’s Thirst on a Precious Resource”.)

Add to this scenario a recent decision by the US Nuclear Regulatory Continue reading →

Plant Vogtle water use

Apparently the nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle will use more water than the City of Savannah, and more than agricultural uses for the middle Savannah River watershed. Much of the water (3/4?) is evaporated, leaving less for drinking, farming, and everything else. What goes back in the river is rest warmer than it came out, affecting everything that lives in the river. Remind me: why are we building those nukes instead of solar and wind generators, which use no water while producing power?

Plant Vogtle currently uses 43.2 million gallons of water a day, and with all 4 units, is planned to use 86.4 million gallons of water a day, or 2% of the *average* flow of the Savannah River, according to UNC’s Powering A Nation journalism team, 9 June 2010.

That’s more than the City of Savannah, according to the City of Savannah.

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