On the anniversary of the French Revolution against a corrupt old regime,
the U.S. House of Representatives took a step towards independence from
the clammy grip of the fossil fuel companies.
This has direct implications on Moody AFB.
No more pipelines. Solar power now.
Thomas Griffin asked Southern Company (SO) CEO Thomas A. Fanning what SO has done to deal with EMP:
If a foreign entity were to detonate a nuclear device above 25 miles above the United States it would cause an electro-magnetic pulse, which would in fact take out not only the electric grid, but trains, all cars with computers, all radios and TV stations, the telephone company, and we would really be in bad shape, because everything that runs on electricity, which is virtually all businesses would be down.
And my question to you is does Southern Company have backup, shielded, hardware and software to bring a control station back up, shielded from this, so that they could replace it, and bring the grid back on line.
CEO Fanning said he couldn’t talk about specifics, pleading national security. He added:
Rest assured that we pay a lot of attention to preserving the sanctity of the electric networks in the southeast, including things like EMF.
Interesting wording, “sanctity”. I didn’t know electrical production was a religious matter. Probably just a misphrasing.
But the other thing I think you should recognize is that if somebody is detonating a nuclear bomb that is emits an EMF force above the United States we’re in deeper problems already.
What about EMP? –Thomas Griffin Shareholder Meeting, Southern Company (SO), Callaway Gardens, Pine Mountain, Georgia, 23 May 2012. Video by John S. Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE).
Tired of expensive gas? Tired of expensive wars? Let’s get off of oil and onto clean renewable energy! That’s the message from Operation Free, a campaign of the Truman Project.
“In Iraq… the lines would stretch up to ten miles long under the hot sun, under constant risk of attack by extremists. I realized then just how vulnerable it makes any country to be dependent on oil, especially the United States, which uses nearly a quarter of the world’s supply.”
The U.S. military is already leading us towards renewable energy. The Air Force, for example, has a goal of 25% of facility energy use from renewable energy by 2025, and Moody AFB is helping with that. Imagine if a substantial part of the military’s budget was repurposed to implementing renewable energy throughout the country to get us off of foreign oil. Now that would be national security!
And we don’t have to wait for Washington or Atlanta to get on with it right here in Lowndes County, for security, environmental preservation, jobs, and profit.
Doug Stoner, Georgia State Senator,
has said that
Georgia Power wasn’t
building nuclear plants with private money; they were using public money,
and that even a public utility is a subsidy.
So it appears he gets it.
Scott Holcomb, Georgia State Representative,
wants a state energy policy,
and has said:
Our lack of an energy policy is an absolute Achilles heel of our national policy.
Click on the pictures of each of the legislature members for their
contact information.
Even better, contact
your state representative or senator.
Or federal, since I think the new Plant Vogtle construction gets
federal subsidies, too.
Or write your local newspaper, or your local TV station, or the AJC.
A letter last week asked, “Do you have solar energy yourself?” Why yes, I do.
When we installed solar panels on our farm workshop in 2009,
the closest certified solar installer was in Marietta.
There were only four in the state. Now there are forty.
Georgia may yet catch up with North Carolina and even New Jersey!
Hannah Solar had all the paperwork ready when
Okra Paradise Farms
applied for a USDA REAP grant for more solar panels a few weeks ago.
Much to our surprise,
Grady Blankenship wrote a LTE in the VDT Wednesday, in which he asked
“do you have solar energy yourself?”
Why yes, yes, I do.
And I have some questions for everyone at the end.
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 →
In his morning keynote at the sold-out
Southern Solar Summit,
Col. Dan Nolan (U.S. Army ret.) asked the musical question:
“When did our Marines become Birkenstock-wearing tree huggers?”
This was after some Marines asked for solar power so they wouldn’t
have to haul fuel in long convoys, which were among the most dangerous missions.
Most of that fuel was going into very inefficient generators to run
very inefficient air conditioners in tents in the desert.
Dealing with that got the military thinking about energy security:
assured access to mission-critical energy.
Looking up, he asked:
“What is it we as a nation need to understand about our own energy security?”
He identified America’s strategic center of gravity as its economy.
It’s very resilient but has vulnerabilities open to attack.
So how do we secure those vulnerabilities?
