Owner of Evergreen Farms, Mike Walterscheidt, trims Fir tree branches to use for homemade wreaths.
Sprinklers at Evergreen Farms keep the pre-cut trees moist during Texas’ hot winter.
While owners Mike and Beth are hard at work, their dog rests on the cement porch at the farm.
Young Texas evergreens can still grow tall if rainfall increases in 2013.
Customers at Evergreen Farms ride the trailer to the tree fields where they can pick out and cut their own tree.
Evergreen Farms owners lined up northern Fir trees in the cutting field.
Drought takes no prisoners, and Christmas trees are no exception. The 2011 drought decimated Texas wildlife, and not even resilient evergreens could take the heat. This left Christmas tree farmers in Texas with little or no trees to sell during the holidays. Some farms, like Evergreen Farms in Elgin, shipped in trees from Washington State and North Carolina to sell instead. Other farms had no choice but to close their doors.
This year, things have changed.
“We didn’t lose any from the drought this year, and we lost hundreds and hundreds last year,” says Mike Walterscheidt, owner of Evergreen Farms.
This year’s wetter summer weather improved tree growth, so Evergreen Farms is back to cutting down trees in the field. Continue Reading →
The latest forecast from the folks behind the Texas grid is out today, and it shows an improving situation for power in the state, while also noting that we still have a way to go, particularly in times of extreme temperature and emergencies.
“The projected reserve margin for summer 2013 has dropped slightly since May, but we are seeing healthier reserve margins in future years,” Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) CEO Trip Doggett said in a statement. “Although peak demand is expected to grow less quickly than previous economic predictions indicated, we should continue to encourage new generation and develop more demand response options to reduce our electric use during periods of highest use — the hottest hours of the hottest days of summer.”
The number people across the state are watching is known as the reserve margin. That’s the amount of excess power available to the grid on top of what’s generated to meet demand. The grid’s target is 13.75 percent excess power over peak demand. But the new report says that the reserve margin won’t meet that target as early as next summer. It will drop to just over ten percent by 2014, and continue to go down in the future, to less than three percent in 2022. Continue Reading →
Wind turbines in West Texas help produce record amounts of electricity for the state.
The federal tax credit that helped make Texas the leader in wind power expires at the end of year. Some people in the wind energy industry seem resigned to the possibility that even if Congress renews the credit, the days of such breaks are nearing an end.
At the American Wind Energy Association conference held last week in Houston, there was optimism that President Obama’s reelection improved the odds that Congress will extend the production tax credit.
“But few believe the production tax credit will be in existence in 2015,” said Steve Krebs, the vice president of OwnEnergy, who was part of a panel discussion.
Dr. Charles "Chip" Groat says he wants to put the fracking study controversy behind him.
One University of Texas at Austin professor has retired and another has resigned his position as head of UT’s Energy Institute, the school announced Thursday after the release of a scathing review of a study on fracking that has become mired in controversy.
The man at the center of the storm for sitting on the board of a drilling company the entire time, Dr. Charles “Chip” Groat, has declined a request for an interview, but has talked to us about his take on the matter in a series of emails over the last 24 hours. “While I admit that even though my reasons for not disclosing my industry connection were valid in terms of connection to the report results,” Groat writes, “I should have made a disclosure.”
In his most recent email to us, Groat writes, “I don’t have anything further to discuss regarding my role in the project.”
Under an Open Records Request, we have obtained Groat’s letter of retirement dated November 21, which you can read in full below. In it, Groat makes no mention of the controversy, instead he writes of his new position as head of the not-for-profit Water Institute of the Gulf in Louisiana, where he and his wife are moving.
UT Professor Charles "Chip" Groat came under fire for not disclosing significant financial ties to the drilling industry, and has resigned from the University.
Resignation and Retirement Result
The long-awaited review of a controversial study on the drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” was released today, and it finds numerous errors and flaws with how the study was conducted and released, as well as University of Texas policies for disclosing conflicts of interest.
The head author of the study, Dr. Charles “Chip” Groat, has retired in the wake of the controversy, and the head of the Energy Institute that released it, Dr. Raymond Orbach, has resigned as head of the Institute, the University announced today.
The review finds many problems with the original study, chief among them that Groat did not disclose what it calls a “clear conflict of interest,” which “severely diminished” the study. The study was originally commissioned as a way to correct what it called “controversies” over fracking because of media reports, but ironically ended up as a lightning rod itself for failing to disclose conflicts of interest and for lacking scientific rigor. Continue Reading →
A controversial proposal from a Mexican company to dig an open pit coal mine near the border town of Eagle Pass will likely go before the Railroad Commission of Texas in January, and odds are it will get the green light.
Backers of the Dos Republicas mining project received some good news before Thanksgiving when Railroad Commission Hearings Examiner Marcy Spraggins recommended that they be allowed to mine the area. The project had provoked opposition from local politicians as well as community members concerned with environmental impacts. Some local business people in the area have welcomed the plan, saying it will bring jobs.
The case highlights the larger issues of coal’s future in the United States and abroad. While Texas may very likely be building its last coal power plant, coal exports are reaching record highs. That’s prompted some to ask if U.S. efforts to control carbon pollution associated with coal will make a difference globally, when it’s simply mined here and then burned somewhere else in the world.
Slide Presented by Art McGarr, USGS at the Fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
A slide presented by Art McGarr with the USGS, shows a link between the amount of fluid injected into disposal wells and the strength of earthquakes associated with those wells.
There’s already a general scientific consensus that the disposal wells used to store waste deep underground from drilling and hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) can cause earthquakes. But researchers are going into a little more detail about the relationship between quakes and wells at this week’s meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
At a panel discussion Wednesday, three prominent seismologists presented their recent work. One of them was Art McGarr, of the US Geological Survey’s Earthquake Science Center. He’s been looking at whether the amount of fluid stored in a disposal well affects the strength of an earthquake.
His answer: it does.
“I think we’re at the point when, if you tell me that you want to inject a certain amount of waste water, for example a million cubic meters for a particular activity, I can tell you that the maximum magnitude is going to be five (on the Richter scale) or less. I emphasize or less,” McGarr said in his presentation.
Over 4 million acres burned in Texas wildfires last year, the worst in the state's history. In this photo, Texas State Troopers Aaron Lewis and Greg Sullivan open a gate to allow livestock to escape a running wildfire on April 19, 2011 in Graford, Texas.
Historic wildfires blazed through Texas last year, burning over 4 million acres and destroying nearly 3,000 homes throughout the state. Over a year later, affected areas are slowly recovering. Donations of seedlings and trees are part of the recovery effort, helping re-grow the area’s lost foliage.
Texas A&M Forest Service with Texas Garden Clubs is joining the effort to replenish the tree population west of Fort Worth. On December 15, they will be handing out a hundred trees to the affected Possum Kingdom-area community.
“We want to give some hope and help them re-green the area surrounding their homes,” Forester Courtney Blevins says in a press release. Continue Reading →
Record hot days in December. Should we be happy or worried?
It was a beautiful weekend in much of Texas. Here in Austin, people arrived in t-shirts and shorts at the annual lighting of the Capitol Christmas Tree. They sang carols in the old fashioned way, but some may have decided to forgo the hot chocolate.
The temperatures hovered around 80.
Austin wasn’t alone in being unseasonably warm — Houston had record highs Saturday and Sunday.
As an unusually warm year stretches into December, more and more people are experiencing two conflicting emotions simultaneously. They’re happy with temperatures that allow outdoor barbeques and even a dip in the pool as winter begins, but concerned that it’s all somehow related to global climate change.
And they’re at a loss for succinct ways to express those feelings.
“This is great weather, but…” is one option. But could there be an easier way?
In the Texas Hill Country, one landfill’s trash powers homes
New Braunfels is best known for its clear-running rivers, the Guadalupe and the Comal seen here behind a city waste container.
For over two decades, trash from New Braunfels headed to the Mesquite Creek Landfill on the edge of town.
Garbage rich in organic matter arrives by the ton.
Compacted by heavy equipment, each “cell” of trash covers some 15 acres and will eventually be covered with soil.
A gas recovery system is made up of 2.5 miles of pipe and 67 gas extraction wells.
Paul Pabor is Vice President of Renewable Energy for the site’s operator, Waste Management, a Houston-based nationwide disposal giant.
From the landfill, the methane gas is piped to a cement-block building across the road.
Methane powers two huge engines that produce electricity.
Each engine cranks out about 1500 kilowatts
The electricity is then sent to the electric grid, enough to power up to 1800 homes in New Braunfels.
Landfills keep on producing methane for decades. This is the entrance to a city landfill in Houston and though closed in 1970, it’s listed by the US EPA as a potential project to produce methane for nearby industries.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), there are 27 landfills in Texas that are producing enough methane gas to make electricity or provide fuel to power industrial equipment. The agency says another 57 landfills are candidates for such projects.
“Texas is one of the few remaining states with a large number of landfills that don’t already have landfill gas energy projects and may have the potential to support them,” the EPA wrote in a lengthy statement emailed to StateImpact Texas.
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