County Manager Joe Pritchard said Finance Director Stephanie Black has received a millage report from the Tax Commissioner. He and she will prepare something from it for the Lowndes County Commissioners for a later meeting.
The board packet is on the LAKE website, in response to a LAKE open records request.
Below are Continue reading
The resolution to reimpose the SPLOST tax as SPLOST VIII, was not included with the agenda for the tax-paying public to see. LAKE has filed an open records request for the entire board packet. Perhaps the county will supply it before they vote tomorrow.
Four bids were received for LAS and Pump Station Improvements with the high bid at $3.3 million, and the low at $2.5 million, but apparently the county negotiated the low bidder, Doyle Hancock & Sons, down to $1,520,858.00. This is “for improvements to the LAS [Land Application Site, aka wastewater spray field], Bevel Creek, Francis Lake, and Coleman Road lift stations.” The LAS is between Grassy Pond and Pike Pond, a few thousand feet from the GA-FL line, in the Withlacoochee River watershed. Continue reading
And more new capacity year to date than natural gas in 2014,
according to FERC’s own numbers, despite FERC betting on the wrong horse.
Joshua S. Hill, CleanTechnica, 23 November 2014, Wind & Solar = 77% Of New US Electricity Generating Capacity In November (Exclusive),
The United States Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) Office of Energy Projects released its monthly “Energy Infrastructure Update” on Tuesday, and the big winners from the month of November seem to be wind and solar, which combined added up to over 70% of all new electrical generating capacity placed into service during the month. If you add in our estimate for non-utility-scale solar, the market share of solar and wind rises to 77%.
Continue reading
A ribbon cutting for 30+ MW of solar power in Social Circle, Georgia,
with no media coverage,
other than a Georgia Power docket update buried at GA PSC.
Claudia Musleve Collier says she made this first quote from email to her,
and wants it shared.
Bryan Casey, with Greenavations Power sent me these photos of the recent [13 May 2014] ribbon cutting of their 38 MW solar project in middle Georgia[, Simon Solar in Social Circle]. PSC “Bubba” McDonald was present to flip the switch!
Continue reading
Received yesterday on Smart Metering in Finland Compared to Georgia Power; also as a facebook note. -jsq
ONLY a monopoly like Georgia Power can proclaim to be “environmentally responsible” yet operate some of the worst coal power plants in the nation. Its Scherer Plant near Macon even leads the pack in regard to greenhouse gas emissions. Do they not understand the reality of global warming? Do they not notice ongoing
drought conditions throughout the country (see http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/)? And why, in the context of these drought conditions, are they still investing in technologies (e.g. coal, nuclear, biomass) that need enormous amounts of water for cooling purposes?
ONLY a monopoly like Georgia Power can claim to “care” for the well being of our society when they operate the nation’s largest biomass incinerator, run the nation’s worst coal firing plant, and are pushing for new nuclear power plants. Have they not heard of Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island? How can they still ignore the mounting evidence in regard to the side-effects of the vast pollution coming from their coal and biomass plants (see http://www.wiregrass-ace.org/linked/second-opinion.pdf)?
ONLY a monopoly like Georgia Power can pretend to “respect” its customers when it forces them to pay for the construction of nuclear power plants nobody wants, or when it chooses intimidation as a tool to push through “smart meters”. The notion that you can’t have electricity without “smart meters” is not only ludicrous but reminds one on “leadership qualities” you expect to find in North Korea but not in the US. By the way, one should note that states like California have given their customers the possibility (dare I say right?) to “opt out” (see http://www.treehugger.com/clean-technology/more-california-utilities-required-let-customers-opt-out-smart-meters.html ).
by Michael Noll on Thursday, July 26, 2012 at 12:33pm ยท
PS: In case anyone wonders, I am not differentiating between Georgia Power and the entity that controls it: Southern Company.
Georgia Power: putting customer convenience and utility last! Let’s compare how Georgia Power is “selling” its smart meters to how one of the leaders in smart metering in Europe does it. Let’s compare Finland to Georgia Power. The result may give you reason to vote in the Public Service Commissioner election going on right now.
Current Smart Meter customer benefits include:
With the Smart Meter program, your electric meter will be read remotely through communication towers. In the future, a number of new customer benefits will become available, including access to online energy usage information.Future Smart Meter benefits include:
- Reading your meter and generating your bill without having a representative visit your property on a regular basis.
- Reducing the time needed to handle service orders, such as starting or stopping power.
- Remotely checking a meter to ensure it is working properly.
- Reducing the number of vehicles on the road resulting in less pollution and fuel saving because in-person meter readings are not required.
- Power outage notification โ In the event of a power outage in your area, Smart Meters help us better manage power restoration.
- Accessing energy usage information online โ view your hourly and daily usage.
- Offering innovative rate options that meet your lifestyle โ better manage your energy usage and control your energy bill.
All of the immediate benefits are tailored for the power company, not the customer. Sure, you might like not having a Georgia Power employee on your property, but the real benefit is to Georgia Power in reducing costs. The direct benefits to the customer are all deferred to some unspecified time in the future.
Meanwhile, for Finland, Look at page 32 of this report: European Smart Metering Landscape Report, by Stephan Renner, Mihaela Albu, Henk van Elburg, Christoph Heinemann, Artur ลazicki, Lauri Penttinen, Francisco Puente, Hanne Sรฆle, smartregions.net, Vienna, February 2011,
There are some minimum functional requirements for the metering system defined by the regulator in Finland:Continue reading
- Remotely readable hourly interval measurement data available next day to market actors including the customer;
- If requested by the customer, the DSO must deliver metering equipment that has standardised connection for real-time hourly based monitoring;
- Consumer must receive the data at the latest when the electricity seller receives it;
We saw that two out of three of the most profitable electric utilities in the world emphasize solar and wind energy: ENEL of Italy and Iberdrola of Spain, both of which operate in multiple countries, including Iberdrola claiming second most wind power in the U.S. Well, maybe those companies are small, so their profits are a fluke. Nope. We get similar results for profits divided by market cap:
ENEL of Italy is still number 1, with no nuclear and a lot of solar and wind energy. Iberdrola is #4 in profits/market instead of #3 in profits alone. However, Electricitรฉ de France (EDF) is #7 instead of #2, and Exelon is #9 instead of #4. Number 2 is Energias de Portugal (EDP), which is heavily into wind power including owning Horizon Wind Energy LLC:
Continue readingWhich are the most and least consistently profitable electric utilities in the world? Hint: the biggest losers all lost on nukes. But the biggest winners may surprise you.
Following up on Southern Company CEO Thomas A. Fanning’s brag that “We are a great, big company from an energy production standpoint,” I looked in the Forbes Global 2000 to see which are the biggest electricities in the world. Indeed, Southern Company (SO) is the biggest in the U.S. and number 6 in the world for 2012. But what about the rest, and what about previous years? Here’s a graph of profits for the top 40 electric utilities from 2006 through 2012. SO is the blue line muddling along in the middle:
Profits
Graph by John S. Quarterman from
What’s that dark red line dropping way below the rest? Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO), owner of the Fukushima nuclear plants. And the red line starting at the top and ending up near the bottom? E.ON, the company that owns most of Germany’s nuclear plants, as Germany shifts away from nuclear energy, after Cheronobyl and now Fukushima. The blue line that ends up as low as E.ON? Korea Electric Power (KEP), also an owner of nuclear plants. All the big losers are nuke owners.
What about the winners? The light green line ending up second by profits is Electricitรฉ de France (EDF), also an owner of nuclear plants, but one which has not yet had a major accident.
But what’s that purple line that starts near the top and ends up at the top?
So if heat waves already require spot buys of electricity at high prices and is already enabling a market in demand responses to bring down, even while most electricity in the U.S. still comes from big baseload plants such as coal, nuclear, natural gas, and hydro, why is Southern Company saying we have to wait on a smart grid to deploy solar and wind energy?
This is from an EnerNOC Press Release of today that is all over the net:
…on Thursday, June 21, EnerNOC was dispatched by eleven grid
operators and utilities across the US and Canada, including eight in Pennsylvania and New York, largely in response to a record heat wave across the northeast and mid-Atlantic regions that put strain on the grid and drove real-time energy prices in some regions to over $1,500 per megawatt hour, approximately 60 times higher than the previous week’s average prices. Demand response reduces the need for utilities and grid operators to procure additional supply at such high prices both by reducing overall demand on the grid and by targeting reductions in particularly constrained areas.
So demand response is energy conservation through energy distribution efficiency.
Well, maybe demand response duing that heat wave was on a small scale. Or not:
“Nearly 1,200 commercial, institutional, and industrial energy users
in Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, Ontario, and other constrained regions responded to Thursday’s dispatch, providing valuable capacity to the grid that helped to stabilize prices and reduce system strain,” said Tim Healy, Chairman and CEO of EnerNOC. “Our DemandSMART application, which streams real-time energy data from thousands of sites, showed demand quickly drop from the grid as our network was activated and allowed our customers to see the contribution they were making to grid reliability and reduced prices.
So sure, this is a press release from the company that’s doing this electricity dispatch. But it’s verifiable, starting with the customer company contacts in the press release.
FERC Chairman Jon Wellinghoff pointed out years ago that Continue reading
The Georgia version, according to GEFA:
As you can see by GEFA’s pie chart, solar energy was too small to chart as a source of energy in Georgia as of 2004. With solar, we can burn less coal and uranium.Net metering is the process whereby an energy consumer produces energy and then sells some or all of this energy to the “grid”, or major energy producers in the state. Under Georgiaโs net metering laws, state residents and businesses can purchase and operate green energy capital, including photovoltaics, wind energy and fuel cells, and use this energy on-site. These residents and businesses may then sell any un-used, additional energy produced on-site to their energy provider. There is a maximum of 10 kilowatts (kW) for residential applications and up to 100 kW for commercial applications.
Solarย Energyย Industriesย Associationย (SEIA) has a report, Solar Net Metering in California,
Protecting Net energy metering (NEM) is the top policy priority of the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) for California in 2012. NEM is a billing arrangement that allows utility customers to offset some or all of their energy use (up to 1 MW) with selfgenerated renewable energy.The definition sounds the same, except for the cap: 1 megawatt is 1000 kilowatts, so California’s current cap is 100 times the Georgia residential cap and 10 times the Georgia commercial cap, with apparently no distinction between residential and commercial.
The result is this: Continue reading
![[Land Application Site]](http://www.l-a-k-e.org/govt/loco/2019-08-12--lcc-packet/map-las.jpg)