While the Wall Street Journal says biomass is
a money-losing proposition,
Stacy Feldman notes in Solve Climate News that
U.S. Solar Market Booms, With Utility-Scale Projects Leading the Way:
America could add 10 gigawatts of solar power every year by 2015, enough to power 2 million new homes annually, industry and market analysts have claimed in a new report.Continue reading
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Re: Forester R. Wayne Bell’s points of May 20, 2010. (Hi Wayne; I’ll get those dibbles back to you soon.)
Where does Georgia Power say Albany’s biomass plant will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 95 percent? Biomass proponents usually say what Forester Bell says: trees are carbon neutral. That ignores the time gap between clearcutting and new growth. That gap from 15 to 100 years or more can produce a lot of CO2.
As a tree farmer myself, I know the pulpwood market is down in Georgia due to the recession and foreign competition. I’d like to be convinced that biomass is the new market we need, but the more I look into it,
the more obfuscation I encounter.
Forester Bell seeks a study showing solar will work in Georgia. Georgia Power’s web pages (renewable energy -> solar -> solar potential)
http://www.georgiapower.com/spotlightsolar/solar_potential.asp
include a map of Georgia’s Solar Potential,
Continue reading
I found that map on Georgia Power’s web pages. Meanwhile, here are Georgia Power Solar Projects. Hm, “a rooftop solar demonstration program”, “plans to install solar panels at schools in each of the company’s regions”, “showcase its technology”. Where’s the actual rapid deployment?
Meanwhile, Texas almost doubled its renewable energy generation between 2004 and 2006 and hasn’t stopped since. Continue reading
He did find
this list of “renewable energy strategy”
hits from a GEFA search.
At least one of those links points us to http://www.georgiaenergyplan.org/,
which now gets us
Are you interested in buying this domain name?The state has apparently abandoned that domain. Is that an indication of how seriously Georgia takes renewable energy?
Here’s something that looks promising: State Energy Strategy for Georgia (SESG), December 14, 2006, Governor’s Energy Policy Council, GEFA. It says it’s an energy strategy, but it’s mostly about transportation of existing fuels such as natural gas. Towards the end of the document in Figure 2 (shown above) the SESG illustrates the pit we’re in: about a third of Georgia’s energy comes from coal, another third from petroleum, a sixth from natural gas, and so little from renewable sources they apparently weren’t worth putting on the pie chart.
The SESG does contain this: Continue reading
Carrie Teegardin and Bill Rankin
write in the AJC about
A billion-dollar burden or justice?
AJC investigation: Georgia leads nation in criminal punishment:
Georgia taxpayers spend $1 billion a year locking up so many criminal offenders that the state has the fourth-highest incarceration rate in the nation. When it comes to overall criminal punishment, no state outdoes Georgia.They note that scare tactics made that happen.
But today, many public figures with strong anti-crime credentials are asking if that expenditure is smart, or even if it’s making Georgians safer. The debate about crime and punishment, once clearly divided along party lines, is now a debate in which conservatives often lead the charge for change.Continue reading
With fountains and bridges: Continue reading
How did Texas do that, and how can Valdosta and Lowndes County help Georgia catch up?
Some years back, Austin, Texas, which has been growing rapidly for decades, needed to find a way to produce more energy. Building a coal plant was not really an option for a city that had long sold itself as a home of green industry. Nuclear had a bad taste because in the 1980s Austin had been an investor in the South Texas Nuclear project, which had been late, over budget, never produced what it was supposed to, and had many political problems. So Austin settled on a new plan: instead of spending big bucks to build a dirty coal plant, use the same money to give rebates to homeowners and businesses for installing solar power. Big rebates: 75%, the largest, and among the first in the country. This made perfect economic sense, producing as much new energy as needed, without coal or nuclear, and distributed where it was needed.
Now Austin is trying a new wrinkle:
The Austin, Texas, city council has approved Austin Energy’s solar incentive program, which includes a new approach for commercial, multifamily and nonprofit customers. The new approach saves $2.4 million over the life of the program, according to the utility.Continue reading
…the economic crisis forced states to reconsider who they put behind bars and how long they keep them there, said Kim English, research director for the Colorado Division of Criminal Justice.In Texas, parole rates were once among the lowest in the nation, with as few as 15% of inmates being granted release as recently as five years ago. Now, the parole rate is more than 30% after Texas began identifying low-risk candidates for parole.
In Mississippi, a truth-in-sentencing law required drug offenders to serve 85% of their sentences. That’s been reduced to less than 25%.
California’s budget problems are expected to result in the release of 37,000 inmates in the next two years. The state also is under a federal court order to shed 40,000 inmates because its prisons are so overcrowded that they are no longer constitutional, Austin said.
Some states even try not to lock up as many people in the first place:
States also are looking at ways to keep people from ever entering prison. A nationwide system of drug courts takes first-time felony offenders caught with less than a gram of illegal drugs and sets up a monitoring team to help with case management and therapy.Maybe Georgia could stop locking up so many people for drug and other minor offenses, not keep them in as long, and do something to integrate them back into the community instead of locking them up again.Studies have touted significant savings with drug courts, saying they cost 10% to 30% less than it costs to send someone to prison.
“I don’t think they work — I know so,” said Judge John Creuzot, a state district judge in Dallas.
Faced with soaring prison costs, states are finally focusing on policies that would help former prisoners stay out of jail after they are released. Some legislatures are reshaping laws that land parolees back inside for technical violations that should be dealt with on the outside. More than a dozen cities and counties have taken steps that make it easier for qualified ex-offenders to land government jobs, except in education and law enforcement and other sensitive areas from which people with convictions are normally barred by law.The specific example they consider is New Jersey, but Texas has also led in throwing people into jail and now is starting to try to do something about ex-prisoners once they get out. Paying as much per prisoner as would cost to send them to college, in a time of chronic budget shortfalls, is not very attractive. Georgia could also make changes to reduce recidivism, and reduce its prison population.Still, the nation as a whole needs to do much more about laws that marginalize former offenders — and often drive them back to jail — by denying them voting rights, parental rights, drivers licenses and access to public housing, welfare and food stamps, even in cases where they have led blameless lives after prison.
Green money is pouring into Austin, Texas, which now has to decide how to
spend it.
Sandra Zaragoza,
writing in Portfolio.com, looks into what to do with it:
Last week, American Youthworks, a nonprofit aimed at at-risk youth, received $1.4 million in federal funds to build a green charter high school that will prepare students for jobs in solar-panel installation, green facilities management, and other jobs.Education, solar, weatherization; who could argue with those things?In the last few years, Austin Community College received $99,031 from Workforce Solutions for solar and weatherization training and, more recently, $59,800 from the Department of Labor to increase the number of women in green job training programs.
And ACC is hoping to bring more funding to Central Texas in federal grants. ACC is part of a group of Texas community colleges that have applied for $3.5 million in funding to build solar-energy training programs.
But do those functions create new jobs? Continue reading