Galveston seawall (fore) stopped erosion that otherwise moved coastline hundreds of feet inland (back)
To some researchers, what’s happening to the sea level on the Texas Gulf Coast is a clear and present danger. But they worry the word is not getting out, or that the State of Texas is diluting it.
“It’s happening right now, the evidence is clear all around the region,” said David Yoskowitz of the rise in the sea level. Yoskowitz is an economist with the Harte Research Institute at Texas A&M Corpus Christi. Continue Reading →
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which oversees much of the state’s power, released projections this week for grid reliability over the coming years. ERCOT says rolling blackouts like the ones we had last winter remain a possibility. The report includes a list of energy projects that it expected to be online by now but are still on hold, adding to the state’s power crunch.
A coal plant that was supposed to come online east of Waco will not be generating power, according to the council. An accident at the Sandy Creek coal plant during a commissioning test has caused damage to equipment that will keep the plant offline until the spring of 2013, says ERCOT CEO Trip Doggett. “We just learned of that in the past few weeks,” he says, “that was a significant surprise.” What exactly happened at the plant? “I don’t have intimate details there,” Doggett says, noting that they had been told about it during the past few weeks. Continue Reading →
While rain is making its way across of much of Texas this weekend, it will likely not be enough to bring the state out of its record one-year drought. Â All of Texas east of Interstate 35, the highway that runs through the middle of the state, needs between eight to twenty more inches of rain to get things back to normal.
“Normal” has become a relative term in the past year. Scientists say the drought is not likely to end until at least next spring, and could continue well into next year or even beyond.
The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department has put together a new “Drought Survival Kit” to help everyday Texans weather the lack of rain. It has some helpful ideas for things you can do that can make life in the drought a little easier: Continue Reading →
A fire yesterday at a refinery in San Antonio was a result of vaporizing kerosene, according to owners of the plant. The company says that a contractor was installing drain tubing and dislodged a valve, “which allowed a small quantity of kerosene to spray.” That kerosene vaporized and caught fire.
“The fire was completely contained within the crude unit,” Mary Rose Brown, Senior Vice President of Administration at NuStar Energy, which owns the refinery, said in an emailed statement. “Fortunately, we were able to begin spraying the unit with water immediately and the the San Antonio Fire Department arrived within five minutes and quickly extinguished the fire.”
The company and San Antonio Fire Department say there were no injuries. NuStar said that the refinery will remain closed for now, but that when it re-opens they’ll send an update. NuStar purchased the refinery from AGE earlier this year. Continue Reading →
Former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling outside court in Houston in 2006. He was sentenced to 24 years and four months in prison for his role in deceiving investors.
This week marks the tenth anniversary of Enron’s collapse. The Houston energy company took down thousands of jobs, billions of dollars, and a good chunk of the stock market with it.
But as Andrew Schneider reports for StateImpact Texas radio partner KUHF this week, Enron did a lot of good before things went bad. “It was a major benefactor for Houston charities,” Schneider reports. “It helped build the Houston Holocaust Museum and expand the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. And Ken Lay led the effort to build the Astros a new ballpark and keep them from leaving the city.” Enron built towering new office buildings and put thousands of people to work. Continue Reading →
Two new reports were released today by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which operates the state’s power grid. The reports look at both the upcoming winter in Texas as well as a ten-year outlook and what sort of risks are in store for the energy grid.
In both cases, the outlook is not good. This winter the grid could find itself strained again as it did during the blackouts earlier this year. “Our assessment indicates a concern if we experience a simultaneous occurrence of extreme weather and worst-case generation outages, much like February of this year,” Trip Doggett, the CEO of ERCOT, said in a release accompanying the reports.
And in the next ten years, the state will find itself with less power and more demand. Starting next summer, the state’s reserves to avoid outages “will likely fall below the minimum target beginning next summer.” This number is known as the “reserve margin.” It’s ERCOT’s extra capacity to handle peak times of energy demand avoid outages.
“We are very concerned about the significant drop in the reserve margin,” Doggett said in a release accompanying the report. “If we stay in the current cycle of hot and dry summers, we will be very tight on capacity next summer and have a repeat of this year’s emergency procedures and conservation appeals.”
A drought is a strange type of disaster. While hurricanes, tornadoes and floods do their damage quickly and dramatically, drought is like a slow death, a drying out of life and land. A house can be rebuilt after a flood recedes, but with a drought all you can do is wait for rain. And wait.
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