Tag Archives: Texas

AT&T can do gigabit when competing with Google Fiber

A challenge gets the incumbents beyond selling slow and expensive as long as they can. Both these networks will use fiber optics, and that plus fast wireless to reach everybody else would be very interesting.

Roger Cheng wrote for Cnet yesterday, AT&T attempts to out-Google Google in Austin fiber race: The telco says it will begin offering its “GigaPower” service to Austin and surrounding areas this year, with further expansion and a 1-gigabit connection planned in 2014. But how much will it cost?

The company said on late Monday that it would launch its “GigaPower” super-fast home Internet service on December 1 in Austin, a city that Google has said it would deploy its own speedy Google Fiber service.

GigaPower would start with speeds of 300 megabit per second, or roughly 40 times the speed of the average U.S. Internet home connection, before upgrading customers to 1 gigabit per second next year. Google also plans to offer its own 1-gigabit connection some time next year.

By moving first Continue reading →

Florida Power and Light selected Sabal Trail for pipeline through Georgia

A Florida company selected a Texas company that can use eminent domain in Georgia to take your land. Does that seem right to you? Florida PSC has to review this pipeline. Where’s Georgia PSC on this?

FPL PR 26 July 2013, FPL selects Sabal Trail Transmission and Florida Southeast Connection to build new natural gas pipeline system into Florida,

Florida Power & Light Company today announced that its evaluation of proposals for additional natural gas transportation capacity determined that the best, most economical solution for ensuring Florida’s continued access to the clean, affordable, U.S.-produced fuel necessary to meet the growing electricity needs of the state’s residents and businesses is a combination of a natural gas pipeline and interconnection hub to be built by Sabal Trail Transmission, LLC, and a second natural gas pipeline to be built by Florida Southeast Connection, LLC….

Both Sabal Trail and Florida Southeast Connection will be interstate natural gas pipelines subject to Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approval and oversight.

In conjunction with today’s public announcement, FPL filed a petition for prudence review with the Florida Public Service Commission (PSC). Subject to PSC approval, Continue reading →

Gladiator School cancelled; 2 other CCA prisons closed

CCA loses contracts, including for its notorious Gladiator School; GEO, too. Some states are catching on to the private prison scam.

Aviva Shen wrote for ThinkProgress 21 June 2013, Three States Dump Major Private Prison Company In One Month,

State lawmakers who embraced private prisons as a cost-cutting measure are starting to have trouble ignoring their abysmal conditions. Corrections Corporation of America, the largest and most powerful private prison company in the nation, lost four prison contracts in the past month after extensive reports of abuse, neglect, and even fraud within their operations.

Idaho cut ties with the corporation on Wednesday, which turned the state’s largest prison into a violent hellhole inmates called “Gladiator School.” Earlier this year, CCA was caught understaffing the prison and using prison gangs to control the population. The company admitted to falsifying nearly 4,800 hours of staffing records to squeeze more money out of the state for nonexistent security work. Shift logs at the prison showed the same security guards working for 2 to 3 days at a time without breaks.

Last week, Texas closed two CCA prisons, including Continue reading →

Georgia behind Maryland and Massachusetts in solar power

California and Texas ahead of Georgia in solar power, sure, but Maryland and Massachusetts, small and far to the north with less sun? Does that seem right to you?

According to the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), Georgia should be number 5. Georgia should be moving up the rankings as fast as any state except maybe Arizona or Colorado, according to an Arizona State University study of two years ago that said Georgia was third among state that would benefit from solar deployment through generating and exporting energy to other states. The U.S. as a whole keeps installing far more solar power each year, but Georgia Power and Southern Company keep holding Georgia back.

It’s great that Valdosta will soon get 2 more megawatts of local solar power. But while we’re waiting for Georgia Power to slowly get around to doling out 277 megawatts over several years, New Jersey has 1,000 megawatts already installed. Georgia is #22, behind #21 Connecticut. Why do we let that continue?

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Transparency could have prevented TX fertlizer plant explosion

Has anybody checked on the various agricultural chemical plants around here? Lack of transparency can kill.

Joshua Schneyer, Ryan McNeill and Janet Roberts wrote for Reuters today, Texas fertilizer company didn’t heed disclosure rules before blast,

The fertilizer plant that exploded on Wednesday, obliterating part of a small Texas town and killing at least 14 people, had last year been storing 1,350 times the amount of ammonium nitrate that would normally trigger safety oversight by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Yet a person familiar with DHS operations said the company that owns the plant, West Fertilizer, did not tell the agency about the potentially explosive fertilizer as it is required to do, leaving one of the principal regulators of ammonium nitrate—which can also be used in bomb making—unaware of any danger there.

Fertilizer plants and depots must report to the DHS when they hold 400 lb (180 kg) or more of the substance. Filings this year with the Texas Department of State Health Services, which weren’t shared with DHS, show the plant had 270 tons of it on hand last year.

There’s more in the article.

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13 oil spills in 30 days

As if three spills in one week wasn’t bad enough, the spills, leaks, and derailments just keep on coming, 13 of them on 3 continents in just the past 30 days, as listed by tcktcktck and illustrated in this graphic. Meanwhile, a solar spill is still called a nice day.

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Valdosta Vimeo

I've been nagging Valdosta for years about putting some of their cable TV station content on the web. Turns out they are already doing some of that, which is a step towards acting like a modern metropolitan area. Received Wednesday via Tim Carroll; I added the links and the [clarification].

From: Sementha Mathews
Sent: Wednesday, March 13, 2013 11:48 AM
To: Tim Carroll
Subject: RE: "The rest of the story"

Councilman Carroll,

Thank you for the recent phone call. As a result, I will research the Austin, Tx media practices to see if they can be implemented in any way here at Metro 17. We used to include a council wrap segment in each show, and I'll ask Shemeeka [Johnson, Valdosta Channel 17 Media Coordinator] why we took that out. But we can easily add that back in.

City of Austin posts Continue reading →

Speakupaustin: a major MSA and local government transparency

The Austin reporting program is in addition to the posting a City Council agenda more than a week in advance (here’s the 28 Feb 2013 agenda already on 16 Feb 2013) and including the entire board packets with working papers and other backup documentation with the minutes. Austin televises and webcasts its meetings live, with close captioning and transcripts online. They don’t limit the number of citizens who can speak, or the subjects they can speak on, and they televise and webcast all of them as well. Plus citizens can speak on specific agenda issues, and Austin has an online forum for citizen suggestions on which citizens can vote on the ones they like.

Is there still back-door politics in Austin? For sure. But you can see a lot more of what is going on in Austin than they can about the local governments here, and citizens have a lot more input.

If Valdosta and Lowndes County (and Hahira and Lake Park and Dasher and Remerton) want to be treated like a major MSA, they might consider following Austin’s lead. Instead of decreasing citizen input by exiling all citizen speakers to the end of a meeting and limiting the number who can speak, while not even putting board packets online, consider continually increasing local government transparency and citizen input.

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Energy efficiency rebates, Austin, Texas

The central city of a major MSA, Austin, Texas, publishes its own video reporting on local issues, like this one on local energy efficiency.

AustinEnergy has brought back its best offer ever deal, which allows customers to receive both rebates and a loan to make energy efficiency improvements. The rebates can total as much as $3200, and can cover as much as a third of the cost of the improvements, including the air conditioning unit. Remaining costs after the rebates can be financed through a low interest loan through the Austin Credit Union.

The best offer ever is financed in part by a $10 million better buildings grant from the U.S. Department of Energy….

Here’s the video:

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Rooftop solar: the most direct route to clean energy industries

Austin vs. San Antonio in solar power Around here I hear local leaders say “we’ll never be Austin.” Well, Austin may be letting San Antonio pass Austin as far as rooftop solar and the jobs that generates. It’s not a matter of size or pre-existing advantages. It’s a matter of political will. Do we have that will here?

TexasVox wrote a white paper in February 2012, Solar Austin: Rooftop Solar & Job Creation,

…the most direct route to attracting and encouraging the development of clean energy industries is through the

the scale of future development will be orders of magnitude greater than what has occurred to date.
mass deployment of local rooftop solar, which is probably why solar has by far the most significant presence of any clean energy generation technology in Austin.

But the paper’s point is that Austin is falling short. Look at the graph: Austin seems to have settled for linear growth in solar power, while San Antonio gets it about compound growth. As San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro said in 2011, solar power is in

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