Tag 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.

-jsq

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 →

Google says delaying solar will cost U.S. millions of jobs

If it’s true for the country, it’s true for south Georgia. So moving ahead with solar will gain jobs.

David Worthington wrote for smartplanet 28 June 2011, Google: delay on renewables will cost U.S. trillions, over million jobs:

Google has published an analysis of the economic benefits of renewable energy innovation. It has concluded that even a five year lapse without a national clean energy policy would cost the United States an aggregate US$2.3-3.2 trillion in unrealized GDP gains and 1.2-1.4 million net jobs.
The study was about renewable energy in general, but: 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 →

91% of voters support using solar power in NC —Ivan Urlaub of NCSEA

Like the previous speaker, Ivan Urlaub of the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association (NCSEA) pointed out there are downsides to too many incentives, such as too much dependence on them which means if they end, so can the industry. So how to generate demand?

They’ve done it in North Carolina:

91% of voters support using solar power to meet our growing needs for energy and electricity
Solar is hands down the most popular energy source across NC, across parties, ages, genders, etc. Coal and nuclear are the politically charged energy sources, and neither got a majority. Number 2 was offshore wind with 83% and number 3 was onshore wind with 82% support. Here’s the NCSEA press release. Here’s the survey.

How did they do this? Continue reading →

This is what a mayor with vision sounds like

Mayor Julian Castro of San Antonio speaks at 44:25 about
…the nexus between sustainability and job creation. Every now and then, perhaps once in a generation, there presents itself a moment, an opportunity, for those cities that are willing to seize it, to truly benefit the region for generations to come.
Here’s the video: 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 →

Energy reliability: let’s do the study for Georgia

Which energy source is really more reliable? Nuclear, coal, or wind, water, and sun?

As Plant Vogtle and others have just demonstrated, nuclear power isn’t as reliable as we might have thought. Mark Z. Jacobson says we can generate reliable power from wind, water, and sunlight alone. Will that work in Georgia?

Elsevier’s policy of charging for peer-reviewed articles from scientific journals is controversial, and some people find $19.95 prohibitive to access Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi’s Providing all global energy with wind, water, and solar power, Part I: Technologies, energy resources, quantities and areas of infrastructure, and materials from Energy Policy Volume 39, Issue 3, March 2011, Pages 1154-1169. Fortunately, the same authors wrote an earlier version for Scientific American, 26 October 2009, A Plan to Power 100 Percent of the Planet with Renewables: Wind, water and solar technologies can provide 100 percent of the world’s energy, eliminating all fossil fuels. Here’s how

A new infrastructure must provide energy on demand at least as reliably as the existing infrastructure. WWS technologies generally suffer less downtime than traditional sources. The average U.S. coal plant is offline 12.5 percent of the year for scheduled and unscheduled maintenance. Modern wind turbines have a down time of less than 2 percent on land and less than 5 percent at sea. Photovoltaic systems are also at less than 2 percent. Moreover, when an individual wind, solar or wave device is down, only a small fraction of production is affected; when a coal, nuclear or natural gas plant goes offline, a large chunk of generation is lost.
Continue reading →